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Russia grinds on in eastern Ukraine; Bakhmut ‘destroyed’

Associated Press

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

The Guardian

Attacks on Pacific north-west power stations raise fears for US electric grid

Dani Anguiano in Los Angeles – December 10, 2022

<span>Photograph: Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Reuters</span> — 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.

overhead view of substation — 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.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report

Spat Over Patriot Missiles Reveals Deepening Rifts in Europe Over Ukraine

The New York Times

Spat Over Patriot Missiles Reveals Deepening Rifts in Europe Over Ukraine

Steven Erlanger – December 10, 2022

The facility where the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline emerges from the Baltic Sea in Lubmin, Germany, Sept. 30, 2022. (Laetitia Vancon/The New York Times)

BRUSSELS — A bitter political and diplomatic rift between Germany and Poland, both important members of the European Union and NATO, has worsened as Russia’s war in Ukraine has ground on, undermining cohesion and solidarity in both organizations.

The toxic nature of the relationship was underscored recently by a German offer to provide two batteries of scarce and expensive Patriot air defense missiles to Poland, after a Ukrainian missile strayed off course and killed two Poles last month in the little town of Przewodow.

Poland initially accepted the offer of the Patriots, then rejected it. They then insisted that the batteries be put in Ukraine, a nonstarter for NATO, since the missile systems would be operated by NATO personnel. After considerable allied concern and public criticism, the Poles now seem to have accepted the missiles again.

“This whole story is like an X-ray of miserable Polish-German relations,” said Michal Baranowski, the regional managing director of the German Marshall Fund in Warsaw. “It’s worse than I thought, and I’ve watched it a long time.”

Poland has long been wary of Germany; Hitler’s invasion in 1939 was the start of World War II. It was also critical of Germany’s policy of Ostpolitik, the Cold War effort at rapprochement with Moscow and the countries of Eastern and Central Europe occupied by the Soviet Union.

Democratic Poland consistently criticized German dependency on Russian energy and the two Nord Stream pipelines that were designed to take cheap Russian gas directly to Germany and bypass Poland and Ukraine. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has only intensified the view in Poland that Germany’s close relations with Russia and President Vladimir Putin were not just naive but selfish and, possibly, just on hold rather than permanently sundered.

Both sides have made mistakes in the current dispute, said Jana Puglierin, the Berlin director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “The relationship has been deteriorating for years, but it’s peaking now and doing real damage,” she said. “There is a gap emerging between Europe’s east and west, old Europe and new Europe, and that’s beneficial only for Vladimir Putin.”

Germany thought this gesture of military help would be “an offer that was too good to be refused,” and would help convince Poles that Germany is a reliable ally, said a senior German diplomat, who would speak only anonymously in accordance with diplomatic practice. After all, he said, the Poles themselves are trying to buy Patriots, a surface-to-air anti-missile system, “so we wanted to make this government’s caricature of Germany more hollow.”

But after the Polish defense minister and president quickly accepted the offer, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the powerful 73-year-old leader of Poland’s governing Law and Justice party, rejected it just two days later.

Not only did he insist that the Patriots go to Ukraine, but he suggested that Germany, which he regularly attacks as siding with Russia over Poland, and whose soldiers would be operating the Patriots, would not dare to confront Russia. “Germany’s attitude so far gives no reason to believe that they will decide to shoot at Russian missiles,” Kaczynski said.

Kaczynski has no formal role in the Polish government, but the defense minister, Mariusz Blaszczak, fell into line within hours. Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, from the same party, and who is also Poland’s commander in chief, was embarrassed by the painfully obvious display of his powerlessness.

NATO allies were quietly furious, precisely because the Patriots would be operated by German soldiers and the defense bloc has made it clear that it will not deploy troops to Ukraine and risk a NATO-Russian war. Any decision to send Patriots to Ukraine, Germany said, would have to be a NATO decision, not a bilateral one.

“Kaczynski knew this and was being totally cynical,” said Piotr Buras, the Warsaw director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Everyone knew the Germans would not and could not send Patriots to Ukraine. And, of course, there are no Polish soldiers in Ukraine, either.”

The only explanation for Kaczynski’s response is political, Baranowski of the German Marshall fund said, since Poland is in an electoral campaign and the party’s support has been slipping. With elections scheduled for next autumn, Law and Justice is reinforcing its base, and “criticism of Germany is a constant party line,” he said.

Some analysts detected a political motive on the German side as well. The offer by Berlin, so soon after the deaths of the Poles, was “clearly a German effort to have a win in the bitter, toxic Polish-German diplomatic war,” said Wojciech Przybylski, chief editor of Visegrad Insight and president of the Warsaw-based Res Publica Foundation, a research institution. “And it also harms Kaczynski’s electoral strategy.”

Even so, “for Poland’s leading politician, and head of the ruling coalition, to say that he has no trust in Germany as an ally was shocking,” Baranowski said. “If mismanaged this can hurt alliance unity, beyond the two countries — I’ve never seen security instrumentalized in this way, in this toxic mixture.”

But Germany decided to keep the offer open, the German diplomat said, and opinion polls showed that a large percentage of Poles thought that having German Patriots in Poland was a good idea.

On Tuesday night, the Polish government shifted its position again. Blaszczak, the defense minister, announced that after further talks with Berlin, he “disappointedly” accepted that the missiles would not go to Ukraine, adding, “We are beginning working arrangements on deploying the launchers in Poland and making them part of our command system.”

But the bitterness will persist, and few expect Kaczynski and his party to stop questioning German sincerity. Only in October, for instance, Warsaw suddenly demanded Germany pay reparations for World War II, calculating $1.3 trillion in wartime losses, an issue that Berlin said had been settled in 1990.

But the criticism of German hesitancy toward helping Ukraine, and of France’s early willingness to push for peace talks at Ukraine’s expense, is not limited to Poland but is also prevalent in central, eastern and northern Europe, although less charged.

“There is a lot of talk about Western and EU unity and cooperation on Ukraine, but at the same time this war has triggered a significant wave of criticism of Western Europe in Poland and the Baltics,” said Buras of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “It deepened the skepticism and criticism, especially of Germany and France, and fed a sense of moral superiority toward them, that we’re on the right side and they were on the wrong side,” he said. “And it has deepened mistrust about security cooperation with them, that we can’t rely on them, but only on the U.S. and the U.K.”

The Polish debate mixes two things, he said. First, there is a “ruthless political instrumentalization of Germany by Law and Justice — it’s incredible how they portray Germany as an enemy and Berlin as dangerous to Poland as Moscow, that Berlin wants Russia to win and is not really helping Ukraine at all.”

But beyond the crude propaganda, Buras said, there is a failure in Poland to recognize that there is a post-invasion realization in Berlin that war has come back to Europe, that Germany needs to rearm and has become far too dependent on Russian energy and Chinese trade.

Poland may not be the only country criticizing Germany over Ukraine, Puglierin said, but on another level, “it’s the political layer in Poland, toxic and nasty.” Law and Justice “jump on this German hesitation and use it for domestic political reasons, and I think it will only get worse before the elections, at the very time when unity is useful.”

There is one brighter spot of cooperation. Earlier this month, the two countries signed an agreement to work to ensure the future of the giant Schwedt refinery, a German facility that had processed Russian oil, now under sanctions.

Sophia Besch, a German analyst with the Carnegie Endowment, insisted that Germany had changed since the Russian invasion. She pointed to the sharp change in policy toward a stronger military and more economic resilience, the “Zeitenwende,” or historical turning point, announced by Chancellor Olaf Scholz. “Scholz is much more committed to listening to Central European countries,” she said. “I believe our romance with Russia is over.”

America’s Toxic Gun Culture

The New York Times – Opinion

America’s Toxic Gun Culture

By The Editorial Board – December 10, 2022

An array of gun cartridges set against a black background. — Credit…Sam Kaplan/Trunk Archive

This editorial is the fifth in a series, “The Danger Within,” urging readers to understand the danger of extremist violence and possible solutions. Read more about the series in a note from Kathleen Kingsbury, the Times Opinion editor.

A year ago, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted a Christmas photo on Twitter. In it, Mr. Massie, his wife and five children pose in front of their ornament-bedecked tree. Each person is wearing a big grin and holding an assault weapon. “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo,” Mr. Massie wrote on Twitter.

The photo was posted on Dec. 4, just four days after a mass shooting at a school in Oxford, Mich., that left four students dead and seven other people injured.

The grotesque timing led many Democrats and several Republicans to criticize Mr. Massie for sharing the photo. Others lauded it and nearly 80,000 people liked his tweet. “That’s my kind of Christmas card!” wrote Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who then posted a photo of her four sons brandishing similar weapons.

These weapons, lightweight and endlessly customizable, aren’t often used in the way their devotees imagine — to defend themselves and their families. (In a recent comprehensive survey, only 13 percent of all defensive use of guns involved any type of rifle.) Nevertheless, in the 18 years since the end of the federal assault weapons ban, the country has been flooded with an estimated 25 million AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles, making them one of the most popular in the United States. When used in mass shootings, the AR-15 makes those acts of violence far more deadly. It has become the gun of choice for mass killers, from Las Vegas to Uvalde, Sandy Hook to Buffalo.

The AR-15 has also become a potent talisman for right-wing politicians and many of their voters. That’s a particularly disturbing trend at a time when violent political rhetoric and actual political violence in the United States are rising.

Addressing violent right-wing extremism is a challenge on many fronts: This board has argued for stronger enforcement of state anti-militia laws, better tracking of extremists in law enforcement and the military, and stronger international cooperation to tackle it as a transnational issue. Most important, there is a civil war raging inside the Republican Party between those who support democracy and peaceful politics and those who support far-right extremism. That conflict has repercussions for all of us, and the fetishization of guns is a pervasive part of it.

The prominence of guns in campaign ads is a good barometer of their political potency. Democrats have sometimes used guns in ads — in 2010, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, running for the Senate, shot a hole through a copy of the cap-and-trade climate bill with a single-shot hunting rifle. Since then, guns have all but disappeared from Democratic messaging. But in the most recent midterm elections, Republican politicians ran more than 100 ads featuring guns and more than a dozen that featured semiautomatic military-style rifles.

In one of the most violent of those ads, Eric Greitens, a Republican candidate for Senate in Missouri and a former Navy SEAL, kicks in the door of a house and barges in with a group of men dressed in tactical gear and holding assault rifles. Mr. Greitens boasts that the group is hunting RINOs — a derogatory term for “Republicans in name only.” The ad continues, “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”

Twitter flagged the ad, Facebook banned it for violating its terms of service, and Mr. Greitens lost his race for office. He may have been playacting in the ad, but many other heavily armed people with far-right political views are not. Openly carried assault rifles have become an all too common feature of political events around the country and are having a chilling effect on the exercise of political speech.

This intimidating display of weaponry isn’t a bipartisan phenomenon: A recent New York Times analysis examined more than 700 demonstrations where people openly carrying guns showed up. At about 77 percent of the protests, those who were armed “represented right-wing views, such as opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and abortion access, hostility to racial justice rallies and support for former President Donald J. Trump’s lie of winning the 2020 election.”

As we’ve seen at libraries that host drag queen book readings, Juneteenth celebrations and Pride marches, the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms is fast running up against the First Amendment’s right to peaceably assemble. Securing that right, and addressing political violence in general, requires addressing the armed intimidation that has become commonplace in public places and the gun culture that makes it possible.

A growing number of American civilians have an unhealthy obsession with “tactical culture” and rifles like the AR-15. It’s a fringe movement among the 81 million American gun owners, but it is one of several alarming trends that have coincided with the increase in political violence in this country, along with the spread of far-right extremist groups, an explosion of anti-government sentiment and the embrace of deranged conspiracy theories by many Republican politicians. Understanding how these currents feed one another is crucial to understanding and reversing political violence and right-wing extremism.

The American gun industry has reaped an estimated $1 billion in sales over the past decade from AR-15-style guns, and it has done so by using and cultivating their status as near mythical emblems of power, hyper-patriotism and manhood. Earlier this year, an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform found that the gun industry explicitly markets its products by touting their military pedigree and making “covert references to violent white supremacists like the Boogaloo Boys.” These tactics “prey on young men’s insecurities by claiming their weapons will put them ‘at the top of the testosterone food chain.’”

This marketing and those sales come at a significant cost to America’s social fabric.

In his recent book “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America,” Ryan Busse, a former firearms company executive, described attending a Black Lives Matter rally with his son in Montana in 2020. At the rally, dozens of armed men, some of them wearing insignia from two paramilitary groups — the 3 Percenters and the Oath Keepers — appeared, carrying assault rifles. After one of the armed men assaulted his 12-year-old son, Mr. Busse had his epiphany.

“For years prior to this protest, advertising executives in the gun industry had been encouraging the ‘tactical lifestyle,’” Mr. Busse wrote. The gun industry created a culture that “glorified weapons of war and encouraged followers to ‘own the libs.’”

The formula is a simple one: More rage, more fear, more gun sales.

A portion of those proceeds are then funneled back into politics through millions of dollars in direct contributions, lobbying and spending on outside groups, most often in support of Republicans.

All told, gun rights groups spent a record $15.8 million on lobbying in 2021 and $2 million in the first quarter of 2022, the transparency group OpenSecrets reported. “From 1989 to 2022, gun rights groups contributed $50.5 million to federal candidates and party committees,” the group found. “Of that, 99 percent of direct contributions went to Republicans.”

The Danger Within

It is important, of course, to distinguish between the large majority of law-abiding gun owners and the small number of extremists. Only about 30 percent of gun owners have owned an AR-15 or similar rifle, a majority support common sense gun restrictions and a majority reject political violence.

Institutions and individuals — prominent politicians, for instance, and responsible gun owners — could do far more to insist that assault weapons have no place in public spaces, even if they are permitted in many states, where the open carry of firearms is legal. Public condemnation of such displays is a good place to start.

Republicans should also show more courage in condemning extremists in their own ranks. When Representative Massie posted his Christmas photo, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois responded on Twitter: “I’m pro second amendment, but this isn’t supporting right to keep and bear arms, this is a gun fetish.” There’s a difference between celebrating Christmas secure in the knowledge that you have a weapon to defend your home and family and sending out a photo of your arsenal days after a school shooting.

Democrats, while they may hope for stricter gun laws overall, should also recognize that they do share common ground with many gun owners — armed right-wing extremists and those who fetishize AR-15s do not represent typical American gun owners or their beliefs. That’s especially true given the changing nature of who owns guns in the United States: women and Black Americans are among the fastest-growing demographics.

This summer, for the first time in decades, Congress passed major bipartisan gun safety legislation — a major accomplishment and a sign that common ground is not terra incognita. It should have gone further — and can in the future: preventing anyone under 21 from buying a semiautomatic weapon, for instance, and erasing the 10-year sunset of the background-check provision. States should also be compelled to pass tougher red-flag laws to take guns out of the hands of suicidal or potentially violent people. Mandatory gun-liability insurance is also an idea with merit.

States and the federal government should also pass far tougher regulations on the gun industry, particularly through restrictions on the marketing of guns, which have helped supercharge the cult of the AR-15. New York’s law, which allows parties like victims of gun violence and the state government to sue gun sellers, manufacturers and distributors, is a good model for other states to follow.

Federal regulators should also do more to regulate the arms industry’s marketing practices, which are becoming more deadly and deranged by the year. They have the legal authority to do so but, thus far, not the will to act.

Americans are going to live with a lot of guns for a long time. There are already more than 415 million guns in circulation, including 25 million semiautomatic military-style rifles. Calls for confiscating them — or even calls for another assault weapons ban — are well intentioned and completely unrealistic. With proper care and maintenance, guns made today will still fire decades from now. Each month, Americans add nearly two million more to the national stockpile.

But even if common-sense regulation of guns is far from political reality, Americans do not have to accept the worst of gun culture becoming pervasive in our politics. The only hope the nation has for living in and around so many deadly weapons is a political system capable of resolving our many differences without the need to use them.

Tornadoes, blizzard conditions, floods all possible from upcoming massive storm in central US

AccuWeather

Tornadoes, blizzard conditions, floods all possible from upcoming massive storm in central US

Alex Sosnowski – December 9, 2022

An enormous cross-country storm is likely to be at its worst over the central United States early next week when a potential tornado outbreak may occur at the same time a blizzard rages about 1,000 miles farther to the north, AccuWeather meteorologists warn.

The same storm will also raise the risk of flooding in the Tennessee Valley, causing temperatures to plunge and winds to howl in the Southwest. It could even spread some snow and ice into the Northeast later in the week.

“You name it, this storm will bring it in terms of wild weather next week,” AccuWeather Chief On-Air Meteorologist Bernie Rayno said.

Much of the extreme weather will occur during the three-day period from Monday to Wednesday in the middle of the nation.

The storm will be in a strengthening phase as it pushes onshore and moves inland over the Pacific Coast states this weekend. Many low-elevation areas from western Washington to Southern California will be drenched by heavy rain as feet of snow pile up in the mountains.

The storm system will spread broad areas of heavy snow and gusty winds over the Intermountain West later this weekend and into early next week before it expands across the northern Plains.

Several inches will pile up in the major metro area of Salt Lake City, as well as Flagstaff, Arizona, from the storm. Blowing and drifting snow on top of the heavy accumulation will lead to difficult travel even outside of the major mountain passes in the region.

The full fury of the storm’s wintry side will be on display from later Monday to Wednesday across the Great Plains. Temperatures will drop, and snow will expand from parts of Colorado to the Dakotas and northern Minnesota.

For example, in Rapid City, South Dakota, temperatures will plummet from the mid-50s on Sunday to the teens on Monday night and remain there through Tuesday and Wednesday as winds gusts of between 30 and 60 mph howl and snow spreads through the area.

While the worst of the snowstorm may occur to the north and west of Denver, blizzard conditions will unfold over tens of thousands of square miles from parts of Colorado, Wyoming and Montana to near the Canada border in North Dakota and Minnesota.

The extensive blowing of the dry, powdery snow is likely to create massive drifts that can block roads and strand motorists along vast portions of interstates 25, 29, 70, 80, 90 and 94, forecasters say.

About 500 to 1,000 miles farther to the south, a significant risk to lives and property will unfold as thunderstorms erupt, become severe and likely unleash multiple tornadoes.

“It does not matter what time of time of the year it is for severe weather,” Rayno said. “If the ingredients are there, then severe weather can occur any time of the year.”

Last year, on Dec. 10-11, 2021, a swarm of tornadoes struck part of the Mississippi Valley, killing dozens of people and injuring numerous others.

As stiff breezes rapidly transport Gulf of Mexico moisture northward next week, stronger and shifting winds higher up in the atmosphere will cause thunderstorms to rotate. Rotating thunderstorms can carry a high risk of spawning tornadoes.

Surging humidity levels, combined with an incredible amount of jet stream energy, will lead to a major severe weather outbreak, according to Rayno.

As if the risk of multiple strong tornadoes was not serious enough, a number of the violent storms are likely to occur after dark on both Monday and Tuesday nights. This means that millions of people in the path of the storm should closely monitor severe weather alerts as visual confirmation of tornadoes on the ground may not be possible in every case.

Following a few scattered thunderstorms this weekend from central Texas to Tennessee, severe thunderstorms will ramp up on Monday afternoon from north-central Texas to western and central Oklahoma. All types of severe weather are possible in this zone that will focus on an area just west of the major metro areas of Oklahoma City and Dallas. Potent storms could wander into these locations prior to daybreak on Tuesday, forecasters warn.

During Tuesday and Tuesday night, the severe weather and tornado threat will expand and cover an area farther to the east, reaching areas from northeastern Texas and eastern Oklahoma to the Mississippi River.

Multiple strong tornadoes are possible in this zone, along with large hail, high winds and torrential downpours. Even where tornadoes occur during the daylight hours, they may be difficult to see in advance due to hilly, wooded terrain and poor visibility due to rain in some cases.

The severe thunderstorm and tornado threat will occur mostly during the nighttime hours on Tuesday and may be focused near and east of the Mississippi River in areas as far along as western Kentucky middle Tennessee, all of Mississippi and western and central Alabama.

It is possible the severe weather threat continues on Wednesday along a portion of the interstate 10 and 20 corridors farther to the east in the South.

Since much of the south-central region has been receiving rain on a more regular basis in recent weeks, not only have drought conditions improved, but the soil has gotten progressively wetter. The saturated ground means that where downpours persist for a longer period of time, the risk of urban and small stream flooding will be significantly higher when compared to recent weeks. The massive storm next week could bring a fresh 1-2 inches of rain in 12-24 hours with locally higher amounts.

Substantial rises are likely on some of the secondary rivers, but river flooding is not expected along the Ohio and lower Mississippi due to very low levels. On a positive note, the additional rain forthcoming from the storm will provide yet another boost in river levels. Minor surges in water levels have allowed some increase in barge operations along the lower portion of the Mississippi in recent days.

The storm may deliver some significant impacts to the East later next week as well.

The initial surge of moisture may occur before the atmosphere has a chance to warm up in portions of the Appalachians, New England and the eastern Great Lakes region late Wednesday night to Thursday. This could lead to a zone of accumulating snow or dangerous ice in some locations. Rain will push toward the southeastern U.S. coast by the end of the week.

However, there is also the possibility of a spin-off storm developing at the end of the week. If all the pieces fall into place, the storm could strengthen quickly, producing wind, heavy rain and even heavy snow for some areas of the Northeast as well.

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Just 1 minute of exercise a few times per day may help you live longer, a new study suggests

Insider

Just 1 minute of exercise a few times per day may help you live longer, a new study suggests

Gabby Landsverk – December 9, 2022

a busy business woman walking up stairs — A quick walk up the stairs could have similar benefits as a longer exercise routine, according to a new study.Westend61/Getty Images

Getting your heart rate up for a few minutes each day could help stave off disease and early death.
A study suggests quick activities like taking the stairs were linked to similar benefits as a gym session.
Regular exercise reduces the risk of dying from cancer and heart disease, and every minute could count.

If you struggle to find time for the gym, you may be able to reap some benefits of exercise in just minutes a day, new research suggests.

Short, vigorous activities in your daily routine — like power walking, intense housecleaning, or playing with kids or pets — may significantly reduce your risk of dying from cancer or heart disease, according to a study published December 8 in Nature Medicine.

Researchers from the University of Sydney looked at data from 25,241 UK residents who were self-described “non-exercisers” over seven years of follow-up, to analyze their habits and health outcomes.

They found that without going to the gym, some participants still got a daily dose of exercise in the form of brief, strenuous actions like running to catch a bus, taking the stairs, or doing high-energy chores.

Despite being just one to two minutes at a time, the short activities were linked to similar health benefits as more structured exercise. Typical exercise recommendations call for 150 to 300 minutes per week of moderate activity, or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous activity.

But as little as 4 to 6 minutes a day of vigorous activity (spread out across 3 sessions) was linked to up to 49% lower risk of dying from heart disease and up to 40% lower risk of dying from any cause during the study.

More activity was even better, researchers noted. Up to 11 short sessions per day was linked to 65% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, and 49 lower risk of dying from cancer, compared to people who didn’t do any vigorous activity.

A caveat to the research is that it doesn’t directly show that short bursts of movement cause better health outcomes, but does indicate a connection.

More research is needed, but the study results suggest that getting more movement in your daily routine may be a useful strategy for improving your health, even if you can’t make it to the gym, according to the researchers.

“A few very short bouts totaling three to four minutes a day could go a long way, and there are many daily activities that can be tweaked to raise your heart rate for a minute or so,” Emmanuel Stamatakis, lead author of the study and professor of physical activity, lifestyle, and population health at the University of Sydney, said in a press release.

Exercise is one of the best strategies for better health, and every little bit counts

Extensive previous evidence suggests exercise offers a wealth of benefits, including better mental health, lower risk of disease, and slower physical and cognitive decline as we age. Both aerobic exercise (cardio) and resistance training such as lifting weights have been show to boost health.

Studying smaller doses of exercise, especially outside the gym, could help bring the benefits of fitness to people without the time, money, or access to keep up with other workout routines, according to the study authors.

“Upping the intensity of daily activities requires no time commitment, no preparation, no club memberships, no special skills. It simply involves stepping up the pace while walking or doing the housework with a bit more energy,” Stamatakis said.

Thanks in part to climate change, vegetable prices have soared in the U.S.

Yahoo! News

Thanks in part to climate change, vegetable prices have soared in the U.S.

David Knowles, Senior Editor – December 9, 2022

A cluster of red Roma tomatoes, shriveled and rotten, hang on the vine, with a farmer looking on from above. — Tomatoes for processing damaged by heat and drought hang on vines in a field belonging to farmer Aaron Barcellos in Los Banos, Calif., in September. (Nathan Frandino/Reuters)

Vegetable prices in the United States were up nearly 40% in November over the previous month, according to new figures from the Labor Department, and climate change is one of the reasons why.

In California, an ongoing drought that studies have shown has been been exacerbated by climate change, has led to $3 billion worth of agriculture losses in a state that grows much of the nation’s food. The megadrought, which covers much of the American West, has forced cuts in the amount of water that states like California and Arizona receive from the Colorado River.

That has left tomatoes to wither on the vine, and lettuce to shrivel.- ADVERTISEMENT -https://s.yimg.com/rq/darla/4-10-1/html/r-sf-flx.html

“There’s just not enough water to grow everything that we normally grow,” Don Cameron, president of the State Board of Food and Agriculture, told the Times of San Diego.

Thanks to a significantly diminished snowpack in 2022, following the driest January and February in recorded history in the state, California’s Central Valley has also struggled to produce its usual output of fruits and vegetables.

Making matters even worse, and more expensive for consumers, lettuce production in the Salinas Valley has fallen further, thanks to an outbreak of the impatiens necrotic spot virus, which spreads from plant to plant and can decimate entire greenhouses.

“In October, most of the nation’s lettuce comes from the Salinas Valley, and they are having very low production because the virus affected their crop,” Bruce Babcock, an agricultural economist at the University of California Riverside, told NBC Bay Area. “A case of romaine is $75 now, and last January, it was $25, so that’s almost a tripling of prices at the wholesale level.”

An unripe orange, surrounded by several rotten brown oranges. — Oranges lie on the ground in a grove in Arcadia, Fla., in October after Hurricane Ian. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The long-term climate change trend in California, however, is causing the state’s government to take action. In August, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced an $8 billion plan aimed at increasing the state’s water supply and “adapting to a hotter, drier future.”

“We are experiencing extreme, sustained drought conditions in California and across the American West caused by hotter, drier weather,” a policy outline released by the governor’s office stated. “Our warming climate means that a greater share of the rain and snow fall we receive will be absorbed by dry soils, consumed by thirsty plants, and evaporated into the air. This leaves less water to meet our needs.”

The negative farming impacts in California from climate change are much the same story in Arizona, which provides more than 9% of the country’s leafy greens during the winter months, Bloomberg reported. The combination of the drought and Colorado River water cuts have severely affected the growing season, and more cuts are coming in the new year. In August, the federal government announced that water deliveries to Arizona would be reduced by another 20%, starting in January of next year.

“Prolonged drought is one of the most profound issues facing the U.S. today,” Tommy Beaudreau, assistant secretary of the interior, said in announcing the cuts.

In Florida, the top supplier of fruits and vegetables in the U.S. during autumn and winter, Hurricane Ian caused up to $1.9 billion in damages to the state’s agricultural industry, hitting orange and tomato crops particularly hard.

Studies have shown that Ian was wetter and more intense as a consequence of climate change.

Eating ultra-processed foods like hot dogs and cereal bars may increase your risk of dementia, study finds

Insider

Eating ultra-processed foods like hot dogs and cereal bars may increase your risk of dementia, study finds

Andrea Michelson – December 8, 2022

Researchers followed more than 10,000 adults as they aged to see how diet relates to mental sharpness.
They found people who regularly ate ultra-processed foods had an increased risk of cognitive decline.
Ultra-processed foods account for more than half of total calories consumed by Americans.

Most of the food we eat is processed to some degree, but not all additives are created equal.

Ultra-processed foods — a category that includes frozen meals, fast food, and most breakfast cereals — have been linked to health risks like heart disease, cancer, and early death.

Recent research suggests that eating some of the most heavily processed foods on a regular basis may impact brain health in the long term.

In a study of more than 10,000 middle-aged adults, those who got more than 20% of their daily calories from ultra-processed foods had an increased risk of cognitive decline over a 10-year period, according to results published Monday in JAMA Neurology.

That’s less than the average intake of ultra-processed foods in Brazil, where the study took place, coauthor Claudia Suemoto told CNN. In the US, consumption of processed foods is even more prevalent: about 57% of calories consumed by the US population come from ultra-processed foods, New York University researchers found in 2021.

People who ate the greatest proportions of ultra-processed foods had a 28% faster rate of global cognitive decline compared with those who ate the least. The part of the brain responsible for executive function appeared to be especially hard hit, researchers noted.

However, balancing out processed snacks with whole foods may help to preserve some brain power, the authors found.

It’s not too late to preserve brain health with healthy foods

Researchers noticed signs of cognitive decline in participants over the observation period, which lasted about eight years for each individual. The average age of participants at the start of the study was 51, underscoring the importance of taking preventive measures in middle age.

Cognitive ability was scored based on immediate and delayed word recall, word recognition, and verbal fluency, according to the study methods.

While most people who got more than 20% of their daily energy from ultra-processed foods scored progressively lower on the cognitive tests over the years, those who maintained an overall healthy diet seemed to defy the association.

The researchers grouped participants not only based on ultra-processed food consumption, but also according to their overall diet. They scored all participants based on how closely they followed the MIND diet, a cross between the Mediterranean and DASH diets that features leafy greens, berries, nuts, olive oil, whole grains, fish, and poultry.

The diet is meant to work as an intervention for neurodegenerative delays, so experts believe it helps prevent the type of cognitive decline seen in the study. As expected, participants with an above-average MIND diet score did not experience the accelerated decline observed in most processed food consumers.

Kremlin appears to scale back its ambitions in Ukraine

Reuters

Kremlin appears to scale back its ambitions in Ukraine

Kevin Liffey – December 8, 2022

Ukrainian servicemen fire with a BM21 Grad multiple launch rocket system in a frontline on the border of Kharkiv and Luhansk regions

LONDON (Reuters) – Russia said on Thursday that it was still set on securing at least the bulk of the parts of east and south Ukraine that it has claimed as its own, but appeared to give up on seizing other areas in the west and northeast that Ukraine has recaptured.

The Kremlin has never fully defined the goals of its invasion, which it said was partly intended to protect Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine. But it no longer speaks of trying to force a change of government in Kyiv as Ukraine has steadily reversed early Russian territorial gains.

Moscow’s troops were driven back from a lightning advance on the capital at the start of the invasion, launched on Feb. 24, and have successively been forced out of the adjacent Sumy and Kharkiv regions, and areas near Mykolaiv in the south.

Kyiv denies persecuting Ukraine’s Russian-speakers and has vowed to retake all lands seized by Moscow since 2014, when Russia captured Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and backed armed separatists who took control of parts of Donetsk and Luhansk.

On Thursday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov appeared to limit the Ukrainian territory that Russia now sought to incorporate to the four provinces that it has unilaterally declared as its own: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

None of these are fully under Russian control, and Peskov implied that in Zaporizhzhia’s case, Russia had given up on capturing the remainder.

Asked whether Moscow planned to incorporate any more regions beyond those four, Peskov said:

“There is no question of that. At least, there have been no statements in this regard. But there is nevertheless a lot of work ahead to liberate the territories; in a number of new regions of the Russian Federation there are occupied territories that have to be liberated.”

He then issued a further qualification:

“I mean part of the Donetsk Republic, as well as what became part of the Russian Federation [through annexation], and then was re-occupied by Ukrainian troops.”

‘NEW TERRITORIES’

Moscow proclaimed in October that it had annexed the four provinces – which it calls the “new territories” – shortly after holding so-called referendums that were rejected as bogus and illegal by Kyiv, the West and a majority of countries at the United Nations.

While Moscow made clear it wanted to take full control of Donetsk and Luhansk – two largely Russian-speaking regions collectively known as the Donbas – it left unclear how much of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson it was annexing.

If Russia were to seek to secure only the parts of Zaporizhzhia that it held at the time of the referendums – behind a section of the front line that has hardly moved in months – it would be renouncing any ambition to take the northern third of the province, as well as the industrial provincial capital of the same name, which straddles the Dnipro.

Last month, Russia’s army was forced to quit all the parts of Kherson province that it had controlled on the west bank of the Dnipro River, including the provincial capital, the city of Kherson.

Ukrainian forces control around 40% of Donetsk province and have retaken a sliver of Luhansk.

Op-Ed: Democrats should use their Senate majority to expose Republican corruption

Los Angeles Times

Op-Ed: Democrats should use their Senate majority to expose Republican corruption

Kurt Bardella – December 8, 2022

Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., left, is welcomed back to the Capitol by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., after Warnock defeated Republican challenger Herschel Walker in a runoff election in Georgia last night, in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2022. The Democrats' new outright majority of 51-49 in the Senate means Schumer will no longer have to negotiate a power-sharing deal with Republicans and won't have to rely on Vice President Kamala Harris to break as many tie votes. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) — With Sen. Raphael Warnock, left, reelected, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has a majority to lead. (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

With Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia winning reelection, Democrats now have a 51-49 majority heading into the next Congress. Under a 50-50 Senate, each party seats the same number of members on committees. With a 51-seat majority, Democrats will now outnumber Republicans at the committee level for the first time in the Biden presidency. Most important, this means Senate Democrats can now exercise the reins of their oversight authority unilaterally. They don’t need Republican votes to issue subpoenas or conduct depositions.

Republicans in the House of Representatives have been downright boastful about their intentions to use their new majority, narrow as it is, to initiate an oversight tsunami targeting the Biden administration and Biden’s family. On Tuesday, Republican Leader (at least for the moment) Kevin McCarthy released an exhaustive list of oversight targets including Hunter Biden, the Justice Department, the FBI and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

The Republican playbook is a simple one: They will use their oversight authority to initiate actions and confrontations that will captivate media attention and keep the Biden administration and Democrats on the defensive. Republicans in Congress are betting the House on the idea that the media will do their dirty work and will chronicle their oversight overreaches as legitimate instead of what they are: taxpayer-financed witch hunts.

That is why it is crucial that Democrats in the Senate embrace their newfound majority margins and exercise their oversight authority as well. Giving Republicans a clear field to dominate the oversight conversation would be a huge mistake that could cost Democrats dearly by the time we get to 2024. Through the extraordinary work of the Jan. 6 Select Committee, we have seen how effective oversight, when done right, can affect public opinion. This committee, incidentally, is about to be disbanded and then investigated by House Republicans.

Republicans like Rep. James Comer, the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, plan on employing a “make accusations first, get the evidence second” crusade against the president and his family. There is no reason Senate Democrats should not turn the tables on Republicans by finally investigating the conflicts of interest created by Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner during their time in the White House.

Documents recently released by Congress reveal that foreign nations were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at President Trump’s hotel at the same time they were trying to influence our foreign policy.

Records obtained by Congress exposed that when agents had to stay in Trump hotels, Trump’s companies charged the Secret Service as much as five times more than the government rate, costing taxpayers more than $1.4 million.

Six months after leaving the White House, Jared Kushner received a $2 billion “investment” from a fund controlled by the Saudi crown prince.

The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington released a report detailing 3,400 examples of Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest.

Let’s be very clear here: This is not a “both sides” situation.

If Democrats in the Senate pursue this kind of oversight agenda, it would be based on facts, building on investigative work that has already produced volumes of documents, testimony and indisputable examples of conflicts of interest by Trump and his family at the time. It’s worth noting that unlike Ivanka Trump and Kushner, Hunter Biden never served in the federal government in any capacity. The investigations Republicans are about to launch are conspiracy-theory-driven nonsense designed to smear their political adversaries.

I understand the impulse Democrats may have to not want to engage in this kind of oversight battle, but they should know that the battle is coming for them anyway. It would be a costly tactical mistake to allow Republicans to have an open field. Trump’s flagrant corruption has given Democrats more than enough ammunition for fruitful oversight inquiries, which should force Republicans to answer for their hypocrisy.

The only question is: Are Senate Democrats willing to step up, or will they yield to House Republicans?

Kurt Bardella is a contributing writer to Opinion. He is a Democratic strategist and a former senior advisor for Republicans on the House Oversight Committee.