-Marsha Blackburn, declaring a war of words against...Alabama?

Ominous signs that Ukraine may soon lose control of Mariupol bode poorly for the Eastern region of the country, as Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly readies a renewed, even crueler offensive in the region. 

• Russian troops intensified their assault on Mariupol, prompting an investigation by the Ukrainian government and allied western intelligence into whether Russia had used an unmanned aerial vehicle to deploy a chemical weapon against the city. That investigation stemmed from a Monday report from Ukrainian commanders in the field that Russian forces had used a drone to emit “a poisonous substance of unknown origin” that sickened both civilians and troops alike. 
   
• The increased bombardment has raised concerns that Ukraine may lose control of Mariupol in the near future. The Pentagon still assesses that the city remains contested but reporting from the field indicates that some Ukrainian forces have been overwhelmed. One report from a British citizen who traveled to Ukraine to fight Russia indicates that he and other Ukrainian marines had to surrender to Russian forces after 48 days of fighting when they ran out of food and ammunition. 
   
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has responded to these harrowing developments with a familiar plea to allied nations for more weapons. And more and more western leaders appear receptive to his pleas, including German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who has now broken publicly with Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who continues to oppose the weapons transfers. President Biden turned up international pressure by accusing Putin of seeking to commit genocide against Ukrainian people.

A more mixed picture emerges elsewhere in Ukraine.

• In regions that endured only aerial bombardment, but no occupying forces, more and more facets of regular life have returned. NPR correspondent Tim Mak reports from Lviv that parts of the city that had cleared out a week into the war are now crowded with shoppers, even on weekdays. 
   
• But in areas that suffered under brief but brutal Russian occupation, they’re having a harder time adjusting to life after reclaiming their territory. Those regions are more heavily damaged, and their death tolls were greater. But according to CNN they’re also concerned that the landscape is booby trapped with landmines. Zelensky claims Ukrainian forces are discovering thousands of these mines daily, and that they may pose a risk to civilians for a long time to come. 

Listen to the latest episode of America Dissected! This week, the co-founder and Executive Director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network Malik Yakini joins Abdul to discuss food insecurity, the consequences of the way we produce food, and how this shapes who gets healthy, accessible, affordable food, and who doesn’t. New episodes of America Dissected drop every Sunday wherever you get your podcasts.

The U.S. government’s ambition to help “vaccinate the world” against COVID-19 is about to sputter to an end. That warning comes via New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg from Jeremy Konyndyk, who heads the United States Agency for International Development’s COVID-19 task force. “We are at a point now where without additional funding we are going to have to start winding down our programming,” he said. The fault lies almost entirely with congressional Republicans, whose bad-faith adamance that global COVID-relief spending be “paid for” has made it impossible for House and Senate Democrats to draft new, global COVID legislation that can overcome a filibuster in the Senate. And the ultimate effects are two fold: First, the lapse in funding will increase misery and death around the world; second, by assuring that many more people around the world ultimately contract coronavirus, it will increase the risk that a new variant emerges that escapes vaccines and once again upends life in the U.S. Real "brayn geanious" stuff here from America’s main pro-COVID party.

• Consumer prices have risen 8.5 percent since last March, driven by gasoline; core prices (which exclude volatile commodities) rose a notably lower 6.5 percent year-on-year, and their rate of growth appears to have slowed down, reducing pressure on the Fed to take the kind of drastic action that might trigger a recession.
   
• Here's audio of a December 30, 2020 conference call, obtained months ago by the January 6 committee, of a Roger Stone acolyte encouraging Trump supporters to "descend on the Capitol" on January 6 and promising that Donald Trump would declare martial law. 
   
• Trump’s top coup-plotting lawyer is still trying to carry out the coup, most recently in a meeting Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, whom Eastman encouraged to “reclaim the electors,” (which, again, is not a thing) and follow up with “either a do over or having a new slate of electors seated that would declare someone else the winner" (also not a thing). 
   
• A gunman shot at least 10 people and injured 16 when he unleashed a smoke canister and opened fire on the subway in Brooklyn. He remains at large, in part because none of the cameras that might’ve captured the attack were in operation. 
   
• President Emanuel Macron has backed off his recent proposal to raise the French retirement age, a late addition to his platform that harmed his polling and raised the alarming prospect that he’d lose his coming election to Marine Le Pen, a pro-Putin far-right candidate with fascistic ambitions.
   
• Russian authorities have arrested Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Moscow-based contributor to the Washington Post and long-time critic of Vladimir Putin who had recently predicted that Putin’s war in Ukraine would ultimately lead to the collapse of his government. 
   
• Gov. Kevin Stitt (R-OK) has signed an unconstitutional, near-total abortion ban, the most restrictive such GOP law in the country. 
   
• Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg (R-SD) pleaded with his fellow Republicans to pretty please not impeach him for killing someone with his car and driving away. The state House voted to do so anyhow, but only because all Democrats voted with a minority of Republicans to hold Ravnsborg accountable. 
   
• Lt. Gov Brian Benjamin (D-NY) has resigned after surrendering to federal authorities to face federal bribery, fraud, and falsification-of-records charges stemming from an alleged scheme to funnel an illegal $50,000 donation to his unsuccessful 2021 campaign to be New York City’s comptroller. 
   
• Rep. Kai Kahele (D-HI) has relied almost exclusively on proxy voting, seemingly because he moonlights as a pilot for Hawaiian Airlines—a company that has business before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, on which he sits. 
   
• A former Virginia police officer has been found guilty on all six of the charges he faced for participating in the January 6 insurrection.
   
• An arbitrator has let two police officers who infamously pushed a 75 year old protester in Buffalo to the ground during a racial-justice protest in 2020 off the hook.
   
• Gilbert Godfried has died.

In case the coordinated campaign to smear Ketanji Brown Jackson, Disney, and Democrats in general as “groomers” didn’t tip you off, the GOP’s QAnon faction is as strong as ever, and eating its way further into the party. The news website Grid audited public records pertaining to GOP and right-wing candidates, and found “78 QAnon-aligned candidates running for office in 26 states in 2022… running for governorships, secretaries of state, seats in the Senate and House, and in state legislatures,” and that their fundraising has accelerated. Some caveats: The southwest and Florida are particular hotbeds for these candidates, some of whom are running vanity races, others of whom might well be defeated in GOP primaries by non-Q rivals. Additionally, the lion's share of the money they’ve raise has gone to two particularly prominent Q-Republicans: Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). But how they fare in the coming months and through the November election will serve as a proxy for their ascendance within the party, and if recent trends are any indication, the party mainstream will ultimately embrace rather than disavow them.

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Chastened by their experience with the Omicron variant(s), scientists are increasingly pushing public-health officials to turn to nasal vaccines, which neutralize the virus in the mucosa before it can infect people. 

Obamacare premiums are down in most states again, three years running. 

Shrooms can help treat depression long-term, according to science. 

Behold, NASA spacecraft Psyche, which will travel beyond Mars to examine a huge metal asteroid.