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- Disgraced former president Donald Trump launching a series of…digital trading cards
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I’ll say it: It doesn’t seem like the Kremlin is embracing the generous holiday spirit.
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The World Health Organization has documented 715 attacks on health-care centers since the war in Ukraine began. A study released last week by the Ukrainian Health Care Center found that 80 percent of medical facilities in Mariupol were damaged or destroyed. Now, around 30 staff members from the destroyed Mariupol Hospital No. 2 and 30 specialists from another hospital in the region have reassembled in Kyiv to open a new, pared-down, makeshift, public hospital to help displaced Ukrainians. Efforts like this are critical as Russia continues to destroy medical infrastructure across Ukraine.
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Pentagon officials said today that they will expand military combat training for Ukrainian forces. The U.S. has already trained over 3,000 Ukrainian troops on how to use and maintain certain weapons and other equipment like armored vehicles and the artillery rocket system. But for months, senior military leaders have discussed an expansion to that training, citing the need to improve Ukraine’s company-and-battalion-sized units (between 200-800 troops) to move and coordinate attacks. The program has yet to be publicly announced, but officials said that the Pentagon views this as the next logical step: to mirror the types of training that American forces get at DOD training centers.
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The United States’ outsized presence in the war has not gone unnoticed by the Kremlin. Russia’s Foreign Ministry warned today that if the U.S. delivers sophisticated air-defense systems to Ukraine, those systems and any accompanying crews will be considered “legitimate target[s],” an overt threat. With the war in its tenth month, tensions between the United States and Russia have reached a nadir not seen since the Cold War. The U.S. has signaled intentions to provide Kyiv with Patriot surface-to-air missiles, which Russia believes underscores America having “effectively become a party” to the war.
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Despite all of the destruction and escalating violence, there is still reason for hope.
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Ukrainian authorities said that they thwarted a Russian attack on Kyiv and the surrounding region yesterday, as their air-defense system destroyed 13 Iranian-made, explosives-filled drones. The resulting wreckage damaged five buildings, but thankfully there were no casualties. The attempted attacks highlight how vulnerable Kyiv remains to the steady stream of Russian attacks that have decimated the city’s infrastructure and population centers in recent weeks. At the same time, they legitimize Ukraine’s claims of increasing efficiency in intercepting drones and missiles, and the possibility that the aforementioned Patriot defense system may further boost defenses.
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The Ukrainian people and their representatives were given the European Union’s top human-rights prize yesterday for their resistance to Russia’s invasion and steadfast defiance during the war and occupation of the illegally-annexed regions. Accepting the award in Strasbourg, France were Yulia Pajevska, the founder of Angels of Taira, a medical evaluation unit, human rights activist Oleksandra Matviichuk, and mayor of the occupied city of Melitopol Ivan Fedorov. This particular award was created in 1988 to honor individuals or groups who defend human rights and fundamental freedoms. It was named for Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who died in 1989. Imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was the Sakharov Prize recipient last year.
Even with a recent uptick in attacks, Ukrainians have remained brave and defiant in the face of unthinkable violence. The world is with them until their country is restored.
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The world cup finals are here and World Corrupt is just the podcast you need to stay engaged and informed. Hosted by Tommy Vietor and Roger Bennett, World Corrupt will give you all the information you need, to understand the controversy and corruption at the heart of this year's tournament.
Don't miss out as Tommy and Roger give you their take on the world's most-watched sporting competition. Tune in now and binge the whole season wherever you get your podcasts.
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A Reuters investigation found that at least 8,000 young people in England and Wales are waiting to receive gender-affirming care from the state-funded National Health Service (NHS) as of October, and major changes to medical care for transgender minors in Britain are creating an even more cumbersome bottleneck. Parliament promised to overhaul the youth gender care system after it was deemed inadequate by England’s regulator of health and social care. Many families expressed their frustration with extremely protracted wait times for a first appointment, an average of nearly three years according to clinic records. It’s a deeply flawed bureaucracy exacerbated by political toxicity around gender care in the U.K. Young trans Britons are turning to international private providers operating outside of NHS supervision. New NHS treatment guidelines were altered earlier this year after the Conservative government, which is resistant to medical interventions for transgender adolescents, intervened. Gender clinicians say that the proposed changes are out of step with international treatment protocols. Once assigned to a long waitlist, transgender minors are effectively locked out of state-provided mental health counseling and other specialist support related to gender dysphoria, because those services are only offered through the gender care system they’re trying to join.
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Tesla stock has plummeted as investors lose confidence in Elon Musk’s leadership with his attention otherwise occupied by his project of running Twitter into the ground.
Musk also is also not doing himself any favors with Tesla investors, having sold another $3.6 billion in company shares according to a new SEC filing. Seems like everything is going great!
The House passed a bill today that would allow Puerto Rico to hold a first-of-its-kind binding referendum on statehood or to gain some kind of independence, though the measure has little chance of passing in the Senate.
So…in addition to the money she takes from whatever corporate donors she has so fastidiously courted, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) is selling clothes and athletic gear on Facebook Marketplace. I personally think Sinema should step away from politics because what she clearly wants is to be at the top of a pyramid scheme.
Prison sentences of 12, 10, and seven years were handed down for the three men who attempted to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI).
Outgoing Gov. Charlie Baker (R-MA) was named the next president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Baker played varsity basketball at Harvard (I met him once, the man is physically huge).
A California state law prohibiting new oil and gas wells from being drilled near homes, schools, and hospitals could face a repeal via referendum in 2024.
The DC Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility recommended that former Trump lawyer and creature from the Black Lagoon Rudy Giuliani be disbarred for his role in the plot to overturn the 2020 election results.
The January 6 Committee will hold its final meeting on Monday before Kevin McCarthy puts it in the wood chipper come January. Buckle up for criminal referrals!
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Matthew Kacsmaryk is perfectly representative of the kind of judges the GOP pushed through to the federal bench during the Trump presidency. He’s young (only 40 years old when he was confirmed in 2018), ultra right-wing, and willing to play fast and loose with his interpretation of the Constitution to further explicitly Republican interests. So it’s unsurprising that Kacsmaryk is the first federal judge to embrace a challenge to the federal right to birth control following the Supreme Court’s shameful Dobbs decision in June. He issued an opinion in a case attacking Title X, a federal program offering grants to health providers that fund voluntary and confidential family-planning services to patients. The plaintiff in this case is an evangelical Christian father who believes that Title X grants should be denied to health providers who do not require minors to “obtain parental consent” before receiving such family-planning services. Kacsmaryk is a Christian advocate himself, and although the Supreme Court has regularly upheld the right to privacy in many cases, Kacsmaryk says the privacy in question is not the minor’s, it’s the parents’. Naturally, the decision is riddled with fairly obvious legal errors, and contradicts a 42-year consensus of precedent in federal courts that parents do not have a constitutional right to target programs that provide contraceptive care. Yep, sounds like a Trump judge.
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