Rep. Adam Kinzinger in final House floor speech says ‘limited government’ for GOP now means ‘inciting violence against government officials’
Bryan Metzger – December 15, 2022
Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois at a January 6 committee meeting on December 1, 2021.Stefani Reynolds for The Washington Post via Getty Images
GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger spoke on the House floor for the last time, having declined re-election.
He condemned his own party on Thursday, saying it has “embraced lies and deceit.”
He also criticized Democrats for boosting election-denying candidates in GOP primaries this year.
Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois spoke on the House floor for the final time on Thursday after declining to seek re-election.
Kinzinger, a member of the January 6 committee and one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump for incitement of insurrection following the Capitol riot, has emerged as a key critic of the GOP from within the party.
In his farewell speech, Kinzinger declared that “our democracy is not functioning” and said Republicans have “embraced lies and deceit.” Despite not mentioning Trump by name, he made numerous references to the assault on the Capitol.
“Republicans once believed that limited government meant lower taxes and more autonomy,” he said. “Today, limited government means inciting violence against government officials.”
He also criticized the leadership of the Republican National Committee, which used the phrase “legitimate political discourse” as it moved to censure him and Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming for their participation in the January 6 committee.
“Our leaders today belittle, and in some cases justify attacks on the US Capitol as ‘legitimate political discourse,'” Kinzinger added. “We shelter the ignorant, the racist, who only stoke anger and hatred to those who are different than us.”
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) rebukes the GOP during his farewell address as a member of Congress:
“Today, limited government means inciting violence against government officials … The Republican Party used to believe in a big tent … Now we shelter the ignorant, the racist.” pic.twitter.com/PkeV9MR6hT
Kinzinger also criticized Democrats for helping to boost election-denying candidates in Republican primaries this year in order to produce weaker general-election nominees, a controversial tactic that some top Democrats publicly defended.
“To my Democratic colleagues, you must too bear the burden of our failures. Many of you have asked me: where are all the good Republicans? ” he said. “Over the past two years, Democratic leadership had the opportunity to stand above the fray.”
“Instead, they poured millions of dollars into the campaigns of MAGA Republicans, the same candidates Biden called a national security threat, to ensure these good Republicans did not make it out of their respective primaries,” Kinzinger continued. “This is no longer politics as usual. This is not a game.”
Dictionary.com announces word of the year: ‘woman’
Erum Salam – December 14, 2022
Photograph: Nathan Posner/Rex/Shutterstock
The website Dictionary.com has named its word of the year for 2022: woman.
In a statement, the website said: “Our selection of woman … reflects how the intersection of gender, identity and language dominates the current cultural conversation and shapes much of our work as a dictionary.”
It also said: “Searches for the word woman on Dictionary.com spiked significantly multiple times in relation to separate high-profile events, including the moment when a question about the very definition of the word was posed on the national stage.”
That was a reference to a supreme court confirmation hearing in March, when the nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, was asked by Marsha Blackburn, a Republican senator from Tennessee, to define the word woman.
Soon after, Jackson became the first Black woman confirmed to the court.
Searches for woman increased by 1,400% after the hearing, Dictionary.com said, the highest spike for the word this year.
According to Dictionary.com, the definition of woman is “an adult female person”.
Other key moments that led to the word being chosen included the supreme court voting to overturn Roe v Wade and thereby revoke the constitutional right to abortion; the death of Queen Elizabeth II; tennis player Serena William’s retirement announcement; freedom protests led by women in Iran; and more.
Referring to the supreme court abortion decision, Dictionary.com said: “Unsurprisingly, it resulted in both polarization and galvanization. That dynamic played out in November’s midterm elections, which upended trends and expectations.
“The outcome has been attributed in part to an electorate, and particularly women, voting in reaction to the Dobbs ruling. The election also added to the ranks of the nation’s women governors, resulting in what will be a record number of women – 12 – serving as governors in 2023.”
Dictionary.com’s senior director of editorial, John Kelly, said that to qualify as word of the year, a word must see “a significant increase in searches” and “capture the major cultural themes and trends in language” for the 12 months in question.
In 2022, shortlisted words included inflation, quiet quitting, democracy, the Ukraine flag emoji and Wordle – the last a popular word game bought by the New York Times.
In 2021, Dictionary.com named allyship as its word of the year. Previous words of the year were pandemic (2020), existential (2019), misinformation (2018), complicit (2017), xenophobia (2016), identity (2015), exposure (2014), privacy (2013), bluster (2012), tergiversate (2011), and change (2010).
“We will beat the Ukrainian out of you so that you love Russia,” a Russian interrogator told one torture survivor I spoke to in Ukraine, before he whipped her and raped her. That seems a pretty good summation of Vladimir Putin’s strategy.
It isn’t working in Ukraine, where Putin’s atrocities seem to be bolstering the will to fight back. That brave woman triumphed over her interrogators, albeit at horrific personal cost.
But I worry that we in the West are made of weaker stuff. Some of the most momentous decisions the United States will make in the coming months involve the level of support we will provide Ukraine, and I’ve had pushback from some readers who think President Biden is making a terrible mistake by resolutely helping Ukraine repel Russia.
A woman named Nancy protested on my Facebook page that I was more interested in securing Ukraine’s border than the American border. She argued that we should focus on our own challenges rather than Ukraine’s.
“We’re over our head in debt but funding a war that we shouldn’t be involved in,” she said. “Enough is enough.”
Polls find American support for aid to Ukraine still robust but slipping, especially among Republicans. And almost half of Americans want the United States to push Ukraine “to settle for peace as soon as possible,” even if it loses territory — a finding that must gladden Vladimir Putin’s heart.
The exhaustion with Western support for Ukraine may continue to gain ground in the coming months as people grow weary of high energy prices and, in the case of some European countries, possible rolling power cuts.
So let me make the case, to Nancy and others, for why we should continue to provide weaponry to Ukraine.
The fundamental misconception among many congressional Republicans (and some progressives on the left) is that we’re doing Ukraine a favor by sending it weapons. Not so. We are holding Ukraine’s coat as it is sacrificing lives and infrastructure in ways that benefit us, by degrading Russia’s military threat to NATO and Western Europe — and thus to us.
“They’re doing us a favor; they’re fighting our fight,” Wesley Clark, the retired American general and former supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe, told me. “The fight in Ukraine is a fight about the future of the international community.”
If the war ends in a way favorable to Russia, he argues, it will be a world less safe for Americans. One lesson the world would absorb would be the paramount importance of possessing nuclear weapons, for Ukraine was invaded after it gave up its nuclear arsenal in the 1990s — and Russia’s nuclear warheads today prevent a stronger Western military response.
“If Ukraine falls, there will certainly be a wave of nuclear proliferation,” Clark warned.
For years, military strategists have feared a Russian incursion into Estonia that would challenge NATO and cost lives of American troops. Ukrainians are weakening Russia’s forces so as to reduce that risk.
More broadly, perhaps the single greatest threat to world peace in the coming decade is the risk of a conflict in the Taiwan Strait that escalates into a war between America and China. To reduce that danger, we should help Taiwan build up its deterrent capacity — but perhaps the simplest way to reduce the likelihood of Xi Jinping acting aggressively is to stand united against Russia’s invasion. If the West falters and allows Putin to win in Ukraine, Xi will feel greater confidence that he can win in Taiwan.
Putin has been a destabilizing and brutal bully for many years — from Chechnya to Syria, Georgia to Moldova — partly because the world has been unwilling to stand up to him and partly because he possesses a powerful military force that Ukraine is now dismantling. Aside from energy, Russia’s economy is not substantial.
“Putin and Russia are weak,” Viktor Yushchenko, a former Ukrainian president who challenged Russia and then was mysteriously poisoned and disfigured, told me. “Russia is a poor country, an oil appendage to the world, a gas station.”
The world owes Ukraine for its willingness to finally stand up to Putin. If anything, I’d like to see the Biden administration carefully ratchet up the capabilities of the weaponry it supplies Ukraine, for it may be that the best way to end the war is simply to ensure that Putin finds the cost of it no longer worth paying.
I don’t mean to suggest that everyone backing peace negotiations is craven, fatigued or myopic. Gen. Mark Milley and other Pentagon officials are understandably worried that the Ukraine conflict could spiral out of control into a nuclear war. That’s a legitimate concern, and it’s always good to peer through the fog of war for off-ramps. But bowing to nuclear blackmail and rewarding an invasion would create their own risks for many years to come, and on balance those dangers seem greater than those of maintaining the present course.
In arguing for the West to stand with Ukraine, I’ve emphasized our national interest in doing so. But we have values at stake as well as interests, for there is also a moral question to face.
When one nation invades a neighbor and commits murder, pillage and rape, when it traffics in thousands of children, when it pulverizes the electrical grid to make civilians freeze in winter — in such a blizzard of likely war crimes, neutrality is not the high ground.
Let’s not let Russia beat the Ukrainian out of us: The world could use a spinal transplant from brave Ukrainians.
Nicholas Kristof joined The New York Times in 1984 and has been a columnist since 2001. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for his coverage of China and of the genocide in Darfur.
Iranian soccer player sentenced to death after protesting against the death of Mahsa Amini
Barnaby Lane – December 13, 2022
YouTube/20Minutos
An Iranian soccer player has been sentenced to death after protesting against the death of Mahsa Amini, according to Iran Wire.
Amir Nasr-Azadani was arrested in November in relation to the killing of a police colonel.
He has been accused of “waging war against God” and will be hanged.
An Iranian professional soccer player has been sentenced to death after protesting against the death of Mahsa Amini, according to Iran Wire.
Amir Nasr-Azadani, 26, was arrested in November in relation to the killing of a police colonel and two volunteer militia members.
He has been accused of “waging war against God” and will be hanged, according to Iran Wire.
FIFPRO, the international soccer players union, said in a statement on Monday that it was “shocked and sickened” by the news.
“We stand in solidarity with Amir and call for the immediate removal of his punishment,” it said.
There have been widespread protests in Iran since the September death of 22-year-old Amini, who died in custody after being detained by morality police on suspicion of breaking the country’s strict rules around head coverings.
On December 8, Iran conducted its first execution in relation to the protests.
The Guardian reported that Mohsen Shekari was executed after being accused of blocking a street and wounding a member of the pro-regime Basij militia in September.
State media published a video of what it said was Shekari’s confession, which showed him with a bruising on his face.
Human rights groups, including the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights, have said Shekari was tortured and forced to confess.
Chinese Rocket Stage Now a Cloud of Orbital Debris After Disintegrating in Space
Passant Rabie – December 13, 2022
China’s Long March-5B Y3 rocket carried the Wentian lab module to China’s space station in July.
On November 12, China’s Long March 6A rocket broke apart after launch, scattering debris in low Earth orbit. Now, reports suggest that the disintegrated upper stage of the rocket has grown to a cloud of 350 pieces of space debris.
The rocket launched at 5:52 p.m. ET on November 11 from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in north China, carrying the Yunhai 3 environmental monitoring satellite.
Shortly after delivering the satellite to low Earth orbit, the upper stage of the Long March 6A rocket broke apart, the South China Morning Post reported at the time. The U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron tracked 50 pieces of space debris resulting from the rocket’s break up at an estimated altitude of 310 miles to 435 miles (500 to 700 kilometers), the squadron announced on November 13.
Nearly a month later, experts are still tracking the disintegrated pieces from the rocket. “There are now 350 debris objects cataloged from the Nov 12 disintegration of a Chinese rocket stage (CZ-6A Y2), in sun-sync orbit,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, wrote on Twitter based on ongoing tracking by the Space Defense Squadron.
China has been reckless with its rockets before, but the Long March 6A rocket breakup wasn’t meant to happen. The rocket’s upper stage was supposed to reenter Earth’s atmosphere in one piece, and burn up during reentry. It’s not clear what went wrong to cause the rocket to break up before its reentry.
The rocket breakup sent debris flying near Starlink’s internet satellites, but Chinese officials are claiming that pieces of the rocket will not threaten other low Earth orbit assets. “As far as we know, the relevant incident will not affect the Chinese space station or the International Space Station,” Mao Ning, spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, is quoted in the South China Morning Post as saying during a press conference.
As of last year, more than 27,000 pieces of space debris were being tracked in orbit by the Department of Defense’s global Space Surveillance Network, with lots of smaller pieces also floating around undetected.
How nuclear fusion works, and why it’s a big deal for green energy that scientists made a ‘breakthrough’
Paola Rosa-Aquino – December 12, 2022
Engineers work at the National Ignition Facility in California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.David Butow / Contributor
Scientists produced a nuclear fusion reaction that created a net energy gain, preliminary results suggest.
The Department of Energy is expected to make an official announcement about the finding on Tuesday.
Fusion energy advocates say it’s a step forward in clean, cheap, and almost limitless electricity.
Scientists have reportedly made a “breakthrough” in their quest to harness nuclear fusion.
The US Department of Energy is expected to make an official announcement regarding the milestone in fusion energy research on Tuesday, the the Financial Times reported.
For the first time, researchers created a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than they put into it, FT and the Washington Post reported.
The experiment, conducted within the last two weeks at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, generated 2.5 megajoules of energy, 120% more than the 2.1 megajoules put into creating it, FT reported, citing preliminary data.
“Scientifically, this is the first time that they showed that this is possible,” Gianluca Sarri, a physicist at Queen’s University Belfast, told New Scientist. “From theory, they knew that it should happen, but it was never seen in real life experimentally.”
What is fusion energy and why is it a big deal?
This illustration shows how lasers heat a target to the necessary conditions for nuclear fusion to occur.Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Nuclear fusion works by forcing together two atoms — most often hydrogen — to make a heavier one — like helium.
This explosive process releases massive amounts of energy, the Department of Energy explains. Fusion is the opposite of fission, the reaction that powers nuclear reactors used commercially today.
Fusion occurs naturally in the heart of the sun and the stars, providing these cosmic objects with fuel.
Since the 1950s, scientists have been trying to replicate it on Earth in order to tap into what nuclear energy advocates suggest is clean, cheap, and almost limitless electricity.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, fusion generates four times more energy per kilogram than the fission used to power nuclear plants, and nearly 4 million times more energy than burning oil or coal.
What’s more, unlike fossil fuels, fusion doesn’t release carbon dioxide — the greenhouse gas that’s the main driver of climate change — into the atmosphere. And unlike nuclear fission, fusion doesn’t create long-lived radioactive waste, according to the Department of Energy.
A view of Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant, in Leningrad, Russia on September 14, 2022.Sezgin Pancar/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
But so far, nuclear fusion hasn’t solved our energy problems on a grand scale.
What Tuesday’s ‘breakthrough’ announcement means for the future
Tuesday’s announcement is likely a huge step forward in nuclear fusion energy, but applying the technology at commercial scale is likely still years away.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a theoretical physicist, pointed out that the process the Department of Energy uses requires tritium, a rare and radioactive isotope of hydrogen.
“It may yet yield important information that is ultimately transformative. We don’t know yet,” Prescod-Weinstein tweeted on Monday. “Being able to do this once a day with a laser does not at all mean that this mechanism will scale!”
What is nuclear fusion, and could it power our future?
Haley Ott – December 12, 2022
What is nuclear fusion, and could it power our future?
Scientists, governments, and companies from around the world have been increasingly investing in a potential source of energy that could provide unlimited, clean power to everyone on Earth: nuclear fusion. Fusion is the process that powers the sun and the stars. It’s the opposite of nuclear fission, the process used in today’s nuclear power plants, which splits atoms apart.
U.S. Department of Energy was expected to announce in mid-December a major breakthrough in the quest to harness the power of nuclear fusion. The Financial Times reported that scientists at the government-run Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California had managed for the first time ever to create more energy in a fusion reactor than was required to drive the process — a “net energy gain.”
U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, said if confirmed it “could be a game changer for the world” in the bid to create sustainable electricity.
The interior of the Joint European Torus (JET) tokamak in the United Kingdom is shown with a superimposed plasma. / Credit: EUROfusion
In fusion, two atomic nuclei are combined to create a heavier nucleus, and the process releases energy. The reaction takes place in a state of matter called plasma, which is distinct from liquids, solids or gasses.
In the sun, nuclei collide at hot enough temperatures to overcome the electric repulsion that would normally keep them apart. When they are very close together, the attractive nuclear force between them becomes stronger than the electric repulsion, and they are able to fuse. The gravity of the sun ensures that nuclei are kept close enough together to increase their chances of colliding.
If humans can harness the power of fusion on an industrial scale, it could help create a virtually limitless source of clean energy on earth, with the power to generate four million times more energy than burning coal or oil, according to the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency.
Scientists believe fusion plants would be much safer than today’s nuclear fission plants — if the process can be mastered.
Parts of the ITER tokamak are prepared for assembly, August 3, 2022. / Credit: Haley Ott/CBS News
“It can’t run away. It’s a very difficult reaction to sustain; it needs to be driven. Whereas fission can run on a chain reaction, and it has to be controlled,” Tim Luce, the head of science at ITER, told CBS News.
Fusion also creates much less radioactive byproduct than fission, and what it does leave behind is “not water soluble — they won’t get into the food supply, the water supply,” Luce said.
Some concepts for fusion reactors being developed today will use two types of hydrogen atoms, deuterium and tritium, for fuel.
Deuterium can be easily and cheaply extracted from sea water. Tritium, which does not exist abundantly in nature, could potentially be produced by a reaction between fusion-generated neutrons and lithium. It is also a byproduct of the nuclear fission process used in power plants around the world today.
Scientists have already managed to produce fusion reactions, but not without using more energy to trigger the process than they were able to produce through it.
Assuming scientists are able to achieve “net energy” — producing more energy than they use to create the fusion reaction — other things will still need to fall in place for fusion to become a secure, viable energy source for the world.
“We must also prepare the path broadly for fusion commercialization, going well beyond R&D,” Dr. Scott C. Hsu, lead fusion coordinator in the Office of the Undersecretary for Science and Innovation at the U.S. Department of Energy, said in a Senate hearing last month.
“This includes public engagement and energy justice, diverse workforce development, a regulatory framework that engenders public trust and supports timely deployment, market identification, attracting investment and commercialization partners, export controls, nuclear nonproliferation, cybersecurity, international coordination, building critical supply chains and manufacturing capabilities, and waste disposition,” Hsu said.
Here’s the Healthiest Way to Drink Alcohol, According to a Dietitian
Erica Sweeney – December 12, 2022
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ENJOYING A NICE glass of red wine with dinner, sipping a tumbler of bourbon after a long day, trying a new craft beer, or mixing up your own cocktail. Everyone loves a good drink from time to time. Though drinking too much (and, we’ve all been there) isn’t good for you, it is possible to incorporate your favorite alcoholic beverage into a healthy lifestyle.
So, what is healthy drinking? “Moderation is key,” says Brittany Kunza, M.D., a medical director at virtual health platform PlushCare. “Alcohol really shouldn’t be considered ‘healthy,’ but it certainly can be part of social gatherings.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends no more than two drinks a day for men and one for women. But, two-thirds of adults say they drink more than that at least once a month.
Drinking too much long-term can bring many health consequences, such as high blood pressure, heart disease, liver disease, and stomach problems. It can also weaken your immune system and increase your risk for certain cancers.
Either inspired by these health risks or striving to cut back for other reasons, many people are partaking in Dry January or permanently embracing a “sober curious” lifestyle. And, non-alcoholic, booze-inspired drinks are becoming more popular.
Many aspects of drinking can affect your health—how much you drink, how often, and your beverages of choice. A healthy approach to drinking alcohol is part of a healthy approach to life. Often, that means choosing drinks that are lower in sugar and calories, such as skipping sugary mixers and using seltzer in place of tonic.
What’s the best way to balance drinking and a healthy lifestyle?
It’s best not to overdo it when it comes to alcohol and stick to two drinks or less a day. But, having a few more from time to time likely won’t harm your health—just don’t drive when you’re drinking.
Plan Shooting 2 / Imazins
Everyone is different in terms of how they handle alcohol. Some people can drink more than others before they feel drunk.
“Alcohol impairment is an individual number that is different from person to person,” says Ernest Gelb, D.O., president of the American Osteopathic Association. “The legal limit is 0.08, but there are many individuals who can’t tolerate that much alcohol. The end result of impairment is the same and will not end well.”
It’s a good idea to understand what’s considered a “standard drink,” too, says Dr. Kunza. According to the CDC, standard drink sizes include:
12 ounces of beer
8 ounces of malt liquor
5 ounces of wine
1.5 ounces of distilled spirits, like gin, vodka, or whiskey
What Kinds of Alcohol Are the Healthiest Options?
Ignore the myths you heard in high school about your body processing certain alcoholic beverages in different ways. Your liver doesn’t recognize wine from beer from a Long Island Iced Tea—it only processes alcohol.
That said, if a drink is higher in alcohol, your liver has to work hard. So if you’re drinking a finger of Scotch whisky neat (typically about 40% alcohol by volume, or ABV), your liver is going to have an easier time than with that Long Island Iced Tea (typically four shots of alcohol—all of which are roughly 40% ABV).
So, usually, the simpler the drink—and the less of it that you’re drinking—the better off your liver (and you!) will be. Here’s what to know about drinking different kinds of booze.
Beer
Beer can contain anywhere from 103 to 350 calories per 12 ounces. Craft beers often have a higher ABV than traditional macro-beers. And more alcohol means more calories.
For example, a 12-ounce beer with 9% ABV (typical for craft brews) has about 270 calories. But because craft breweries don’t have to list the calorie count on their beers, you can use this handy equation to estimate the number of calories in your beer: Multiply the ABV by 2.5, then multiply that by the number of ounces in your beer.
Vodka, tequila, and other spirits
Put this in the myth category. Tequila—as well as vodka, rum, and gin—all have zero grams of carbs, so they won’t raise your blood sugar if you drink them straight up. If you have diabetes, you should count your drink as two fat exchanges.
Oliver Henze / EyeEm
But don’t fall for the hype that choosing a tequila made from 100 percent agave changes the impact. All of the health attributes of agave (aka lower glycemic index, etc.) are gone once it’s been distilled into tequila. That said, choosing pure, agave tequila means you’ll typically skip unnecessary additives like caramel coloring. It’s also gluten-free.
Most hard seltzers are lower in alcohol, ranging from 4% to 6% ABV. But, they can contain added sugar.
Look for brands that offer very little sugar per serving. Otherwise, you’ll take in an overload of calories, mainly from the sweet stuff. Spiked seltzers, on the other hand, aren’t a bad option. Ideally, you want one that’s zero-calorie flavored sparkling water with booze added.
Wine
Most wines contain 120-130 calories per 5-ounce glass. But, the sugar content can vary. A glass of red table wine contains about 0.9 grams of sugar, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Some white wines, like chardonnay, can contain 1.4 grams of sugar, and super-sweet dessert wines can have 7 grams.
Cocktails
Determining the calorie and sugar content of a cocktail is tricky, as it depends on what ingredients they contain. A simple vodka soda with seltzer and a squeeze of lime would be a low-calorie, low-sugar option.
But, sweet cocktails like a mai tai can have as much as 300 calories and loads of sugar. Creamy drinks like a White Russian or Piña Colada can clock in at more than 500 calories.
It’s always a good idea to opt for low-calorie mixers and avoid drinks overflowing with sugar, Dr. Gelb says.
You also need to drink plenty of water, too
Alcohol is a dehydrator. So, it’s crucial to drink plenty of water while you’re enjoying a beer or cocktail.
ljubaphoto
“Physicians recommend a one-for-one ratio, which is one 8-ounce glass of water for every alcoholic drink,” says Brian Fiani, D.O., attending neurosurgeon at Weill Cornell Medicine/NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and vice chair of the American Osteopathic Association Bureau of Emerging Leaders.
Drinking alcohol can also irritate the stomach, worsen acid reflux, and contribute to gastritis, Dr. Kunza says. So, it’s a good idea to eat something before you drink or while you’re drinking.
How Drinking Too Much Affects Your Body
Having a few too many glasses of wine or overdoing it on the beer is OK every so often. Drinking too much of even low-calorie alcohol long-term can be detrimental to your health.
For one, it can affect the brain and spine. “Specifically, regarding the central nervous system, alcohol slows down the cerebral cortex process, which can lead to poor judgment,” Dr. Fiani says.
Long-term drinking can damage the brain’s frontal lobes, which can affect decision-making, memory, judgment, and impulses, he adds. It can also lead to degenerative disc disease of the spine and cause back pain.
Excessive alcohol intake over a long time period can cause a thiamine deficiency, which might lead to someone developing the brain disorder Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome, Fiani says. “This condition can cause irreversible mental confusion, loss of coordination, and memory problems similar to dementia.”
Overdoing it on alcohol can cause (or increase your risk for) a number of other health problems, like liver disease, pancreatitis, cancer, high blood pressure, anemia, GI problems, and other conditions.
Signs You Might Be Drinking Too Much
Excessive daily drinking could signal a drinking problem. “Individuals who can’t just have one drink would be a warning sign,” Dr. Gelb says.
The bottom line is: When alcohol or any substance use begins to interfere with your life, it’s problematic, says Lea McMahon, LPC, Ed.D., chief clinical officer at Symetria Recovery.
Mental health and addiction professionals use criteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) to assess substance use and how it affects someone’s life, she says. Patients are asked a series of questions, including:
Do you drink more than you mean to?
Do you want to stop but can’t?
Is drinking taking over your life?
Is drinking getting in the way of day-to-day activities?
Is drinking getting in the way of your relationships?
Do you need to drink more than you used to?
“The number of yes answers determines the degree to which one’s substance use is problematic,” McMahon says. For example, two or three yeses might signal a mild alcohol use disorder, four or five a moderate disorder, and six or more a severe disorder.
Russia grinds on in eastern Ukraine; Bakhmut ‘destroyed’
Jamey Keaten – December 10, 2022
An aerial view of Bakhmut, the site of the heaviest battles with the Russian troops, in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, Friday, Dec. 9, 2022. (AP Photo/LIBKOS)Stretchers are seen outside a city hospital, where wounded Ukrainian soldiers are brought for treatment, in Bakhmut, the site of heavy battles with Russian troops, in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, Friday, Dec. 9, 2022. (AP Photo/LIBKOS)An emergency worker and his dog warm up in front of a wood-burning oven in a shelter in Bakhmut, the site of the heaviest battles with the Russian troops, in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, Friday, Dec. 9, 2022. (AP Photo/LIBKOS)
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian forces have turned the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut into ruins, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, while Ukraine’s military on Saturday reported missile, rocket and air strikes in multiple parts of the country that Moscow is trying to conquer after months of resistance.
The latest battles of Russia’s 9 1/2 month war in Ukraine have centered on four provinces that Russian President Vladimir Putin triumphantly — and illegally — claimed to have annexed in late September. The fighting indicates Russia’s struggle to establish control of those regions and Ukraine’s persistence to reclaim them.
Zelenskyy said the situation “remains very difficult” in several frontline cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Together, the provinces make up the Donbas, an expansive industrial region bordering Russia that Putin identified as a focus from the war’s outset and where Moscow-backed separatists have fought since 2014.
“Bakhmut, Soledar, Maryinka, Kreminna. For a long time, there is no living place left on the land of these areas that have not been damaged by shells and fire,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address, naming cities that have again found themselves in the crosshairs. “The occupiers actually destroyed Bakhmut, another Donbas city that the Russian army turned into burnt ruins.”
Some buildings remain standing in Bakhmut, and the remaining residents still mill about the streets. But like Mariupol and other contested cities, it endured a long siege and spent weeks without water and power even before Moscow launched massive strikes to take out public utilities across Ukraine.
The Donetsk region’s governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, estimated seven weeks ago that 90% of the city’s prewar population of over 70,000 had fled in the months since Moscow focused on seizing the entire Donbas.
The Ukrainian military General Staff reported missile attacks, about 20 airstrikes and more than 60 rocket attacks across Ukraine between Friday and Saturday. Spokesperson Oleksandr Shtupun said the most active fighting was in the Bakhmut district, where more than 20 populated places came under fire. He said Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks in Donetsk and neighboring Luhansk.
Russia’s grinding eastern offensive succeeded in capturing almost all of Luhansk during the summer. Donetsk eluded the same fate, and the Russian military in recent weeks has poured manpower and resources around Bakhmut in an attempt to encircle the city, analysts and Ukrainian officials have said.
After Ukrainian forces recaptured the southern city of Kherson nearly a month ago, the battle heated up around Bakhmut, demonstrating Putin’s desire for visible gains following weeks of clear setbacks in Ukraine.
Taking Bakhmut would rupture Ukraine’s supply lines and open a route for Russian forces to press on toward Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, key Ukrainian strongholds in Donetsk. Russia has battered Bakhmut with rockets for more than half of the year. A ground assault accelerated after its troops forced the Ukrainians to withdraw from Luhansk in July.
But some analysts have questioned Russia’s strategic logic in the relentless pursuit to take Bakhmut and surrounding areas that also came under intense shelling in the past weeks, and where Ukrainian officials reported that some residents were living in damp basements.
“The costs associated with six months of brutal, grinding, and attrition-based combat around #Bakhmut far outweigh any operational advantage that the #Russians can obtain from taking Bakhmut,” the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank in Washington, posted on its Twitter feed on Thursday.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Saturday that Russian troops also pressed their Donbas offensive in the direction of the Donetsk city of Lyman, which is 65 kilometers (40 miles) north of Bakhmut. According to the ministry, they “managed to take more advantageous positions for further advancement.”
Russia’s forces first occupied the city in May but withdrew in early October. Ukrainian authorities said at the time they found mines on the bodies of dead Russian soldiers that were set to explode when someone tried to clear the corpses, as well as the bodies of civilian residents killed by shelling or who had died from a lack of food and medicine.
On Friday, Putin lashed out at recent comments by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said a 2015 peace deal for eastern Ukraine negotiated by France and Germany had bought time for Ukraine to prepare for war with Russia this year.
That deal was aimed to cool tensions after pro-Russia separatists seized territory in the Donbas a year earlier, sparking a war with Ukrainian forces that ballooned into a war with Russia itself after the Feb. 24 full-scale invasion.
Ukraine’s military on Saturday also reported strikes in other provinces: Kharkiv and Sumy in the northeast, central Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia in the southeast and Kherson in the south. The latter two, along with Donetsk and Luhansk, are the four regions Putin claims are now Russian territory.
A month ago, Russian troops withdrew from the western side of the Dniper River where it cuts through Kherson province, allowing Ukrainians forces to declare the region’s capital city liberated. But the Russians still occupy a majority of the province and have continued to attack from their news positions across the river.
Writing on Telegram, the deputy head of Zelenskyy’s office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said two civilians died and another eight were wounded during dozens of mortar, rocket and artillery attacks over the previous day. Residential areas, a hospital, shops, warehouses and critical infrastructure in the Kherson region were damaged, he said.
To the west, drone attacks overnight left much of Odesa province, including its namesake Black Sea port city, without electricity, regional Gov. Maxim Marchenko said. Several energy facilities were destroyed at once, leaving all customers except hospitals, maternity homes, boiler plants and pumping stations were without power, electric company DTEK said Saturday.
The Odesa regional administration’s energy department said late Saturday that fully restoring electricity could take as long as three months and it urged families whose homes are without power to leave the region if possible.
Attacks on Pacific north-west power stations raise fears for US electric grid
Dani Anguiano in Los Angeles – December 10, 2022
Photograph: Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Reuters
A string of attacks on power facilities in Oregon and Washington has caused alarm and highlighted the vulnerabilities of the US electric grid.
The attacks in the Pacific north-west come just days after a similar assault on North Carolina power stations that cut electricity to 40,000 people.
As first reported by Oregon Public Broadcasting and KUOW Public Radio, there have been at least six attacks, some of which involved firearms and caused residents to lose power. Two of the attacks shared similarities with the incident in Moore county, North Carolina, where two stations were hit by gunfire. Authorities have not yet revealed a motive for the North Carolina attack.
The four Pacific north-west utilities whose equipment was attacked have said they are cooperating with the FBI. The agency has not yet confirmed if it is investigating the incidents.
It’s unknown who is behind the attacks but experts have long warned of discussion among extremists of disrupting the nation’s power grid.
Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) said in a statement on Thursday that it was seeking tips about “trespassing, vandalism and malicious damage of equipment” at a substation in Clackamas county on 24 November that caused damage and required cleanup costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Someone clearly wanted to damage equipment and, possibly, cause a power outage,” said John Lahti, the utility’s transmission vice-president of field services. “We were fortunate to avoid any power supply disruption, which would have jeopardized public safety, increased financial damages and presented challenges to the community on a holiday.”
Any attack on electric infrastructure “potentially puts the safety of the public and our workers at risk”, said BPA, which delivers hydropower across the Pacific north-west .
Portland General Electric, a public utility that provides electricity to nearly half of the state’s population, said it had begun repairs after suffering “a deliberate physical attack on one of our substations” that also occurred in the Clackamas area in late November 2022. It said it was “actively cooperating” with the FBI.
Puget Sound Energy, an energy utility in Washington, reported two cases of vandalism at two substations in late November to the FBI and peer utilities, but said the incidents appeared to be unrelated to other recent attacks.
“There is no indication that these vandalism attempts indicate a greater risk to our operations and we have extensive measures to monitor, protect and minimize the risk to our equipment and infrastructure,” the company said in a statement.
Duke Energy workers repair an electrical substation that they said was hit by gunfire, near Pinehurst, North Carolina, on Tuesday. Photograph: Drone Base/Reuters
Experts and intelligence analysts have long warned of both the vulnerability of the US power grid and talk among extremists about attacking the crucial infrastructure.
“It’s very vulnerable,” said Keith Taylor, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who has worked with energy utilities. “[These attacks] are a real threat.”
The physical risks to the power grid have been known for decades, Granger Morgan, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told CBS. “We’ve made a bit of progress, but the system is still quite vulnerable,” he said.
A US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report released in January warned that domestic extremists have been developing “credible, specific plans” to attack electricity infrastructure since at least 2020.
The DHS has cited a document shared on a Telegram channel used by extremists that included a white supremacist guide to attacking an electric grid with firearms, CNN reported.
“These fringe groups have been talking about this for a long time,” Taylor said. “I’m not at all surprised this happened – I’m surprised it’s taken this long.”
Three men who law enforcement identified as members of the Boogaloo movement allegedly planned to attack a substation in Nevada in 2020 to distract police and attempt to incite a riot.
In 2013, still unknown assailants cut fiber-optic phone lines and used a sniper to fire shots at a Pacific Gas & Electric substation near San Jose in what appeared to be a carefully planned attack that caused millions of dollars in damage. The attack prompted the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (Ferc) to order grid operators to increase security.
“They knew what they were doing. They had a specific objective. They wanted to knock out the substation,” Jon Wellinghoff, the then chair of Ferc, told 60 Minutes, adding that the attack could have “brought down all of Silicon Valley”.
After the 2013 attack in California, a Ferc analysis found that attackers could cause a blackout coast-to-coast if they took out only nine of the 55,000 substations in the US.
The US electrical grid is vast and sprawling with 450,000 miles of transmission lines, 55,000 substations and 6,400 power plants. Power plants and substations are dispersed in every corner of the country, connected by transmission lines that transport electricity through farmland, forests and swamps. Attackers do not necessarily have to get close to cause significant damage.
“In a centralized system, if I [want] to take out one coal-fired plant, I don’t even have to take out the plant, I just have to take out the transmission line,” said Taylor. “You can cause a ripple effect where one outage can cause an entire seaboard to go down.”
