Much of Ukraine remained without heat or power after the most devastating Russian air strikes on its energy grid so far, and in Kyiv residents were warned to brace for further attacks and stock up on water, food and warm clothing.

Moscow acknowledges attacking basic infrastructure, saying it aims to reduce Ukraine’s ability to fight and push it to negotiate. Kyiv says such attacks are a war crime.

“Together we endured nine months of full-scale war and Russia has not found a way to break us, and will not find one,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a nightly video address on Thursday.

Zelenskiy also accused Russia of incessantly shelling Kherson, the southern Ukrainian city that it abandoned earlier this month. Seven people were killed and 21 wounded in a Russian attack on Thursday, local authorities said.

Viewed from space, Ukraine has become a dark patch on the globe at night, NASA satellite images showed.

Zelenskiy said that while power, heat, communications and water were being restored gradually, problems still existed with water supplies in 15 regions.

Ukrenergo, which oversees Ukraine’s national power grid, said 50% of demand was not being met as of 7 p.m. Kyiv time (1700 GMT) on Thursday.

In the capital Kyiv, a city of three million, 60% of residents were without power amid temperatures well below freezing, mayor Vitaly Klitschko said.

“We understand that missile strikes like this could happen again. We have to be ready for any developments,” he added, according to Kyiv city council.

Authorities have set up “invincibility centres”, where people can charge phones, warm up and get hot drinks.

“It is the second day we are without power and food. More than 60 children are waiting for food and we cannot prepare anything unless the power gets fixed,” said a woman at one such centre in Kyiv.

Russia’s barrage killed 11 people on Thursday and shut down all of Ukraine’s nuclear plants for the first time in 40 years.

Thursday marked nine months since Moscow launched what it called a “special military operation” to protect Russian-speakers. Ukraine and the West say the invasion is an unprovoked war of aggression.

Since early October, Russia has launched missiles roughly once a week in a bid to destroy the Ukrainian power grid.

Zelenskiy told the Financial Times that this week’s strikes had created a situation not seen for 80 or 90 years – “a country on the European continent where there was totally no light.”

British Foreign Minister James Cleverly visited Ukraine and will pledge millions of pounds in further support to ensure the country has the help it needs through winter, his office said on Friday.

Cleverly, who is set to meet Zelenskiy on the trip, condemned Russia for its “brutal attacks” on civilians, hospitals and energy infrastructure.

Ukrainian officials said a reactor at one nuclear plant, Khmelnytskyi, had been reconnected to the grid late on Thursday.

The vast Zaporizhzhia plant in Russian-held territory was reconnected earlier on Thursday, Ukrainian nuclear power company Energoatom said.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said it was Kyiv’s fault Ukrainians were suffering because it refused to yield to Moscow’s demands, which he did not spell out. Ukraine says it will only stop fighting when all Russian forces have left.

Nuclear officials say interruptions in power can disrupt cooling systems and cause an atomic disaster.

More than 15,000 people have gone missing during the war in Ukraine, an official in the Kyiv office of the Hague-based International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) said.

The ICMP’s programme director for Europe, Matthew Holliday, said it was unclear how many people had been forcibly transferred, were being held in detention in Russia, were alive and separated from family members, or had died and been buried in makeshift graves.

In Kyiv, members of the Kyiv National Academic Operetta Theater tearfully bid farewell to 26-year-old ballet dancer Vadym Khlupianets who was killed fighting Russian troops.

Moscow shifted to the tactic of striking Ukraine’s infrastructure even as Kyiv has inflicted battlefield defeats on Russian forces since September.

The war’s first winter will now test whether Ukraine can press on with its campaign to recapture territory, or whether Russia’s commanders can halt Kyiv’s momentum.

Zelenskiy said that in some areas Ukrainian troops were preparing to advance but gave no details.

Having retreated, Russia has a far shorter line to defend to hold on to seized lands, with more than a third of the front now blocked off by the Dnipro River.

Russia has pursued an offensive of its own along the front line west of the city of Donetsk, held by Moscow’s proxies since 2014. Ukraine said Russian forces tried again to advance on their main targets, Bakhmut and Avdiivka, with limited success.

Reuters could not immediately verify the battlefield accounts.

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SAN FRANCISCO — New Twitter owner Elon Musk said Thursday that he is granting “amnesty” for suspended accounts, which online safety experts predict will spur a rise in harassment, hate speech and misinformation.

Read More: Twitter Is Collapsing, and Nothing Can Replace It

The billionaire’s announcement came after he asked in a poll posted to his timeline to vote on reinstatements for accounts that have not “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.” The yes vote was 72%.

“The people have spoken. Amnesty begins next week. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted using a Latin phrase meaning “the voice of the people, the voice of God.”

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Musk used the same Latin phrase after posting a similar poll last last weekend before reinstating the account of former President Donald Trump, which Twitter had banned for encouraging the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Trump has said he won’t return to Twitter but has not deleted his account.

Read More: What Donald Trump’s Twitter Reinstatement Means for TRUTH Social

Such online polls are anything but scientific and can easily be influenced by bots.

In the month since Musk took over Twitter, groups that monitor the platform for racist, anti-Semitic and other toxic speech say it’s been on the rise on the world’s de facto public square. That has included a surge in racist abuse of World Cup soccer players that Twitter is allegedly failing to act on.

The uptick in harmful content is in large part due to the disorder following Musk’s decision to lay off half the company’s 7,500-person workforce, fire top executives, and then institute a series of ultimatums that prompted hundreds more to quit. Also let go were an untold number of contractors responsible for content moderation. Among those resigning over a lack of faith in Musk’s willingness to keep Twitter from devolving into a chaos of uncontrolled speech were Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth.

Read More: Big Tech Layoffs Are Hurting Workers Far Beyond Silicon Valley

Major advertisers have also abandoned the platform.

On Oct. 28, the day after he took control, Musk tweeted that no suspended accounts would be reinstated until Twitter formed a “content moderation council” with diverse viewpoints that would consider the cases.

On Tuesday, he said he was reneging on that promise because he’d agreed to at the insistence of “a large coalition of political-social activists groups” who later ”broke the deal” by urging that advertisers at least temporarily stop giving Twitter their business.

Read More: Elon Musk Is the Lord of Twitter. We Are the Peasants

A day earlier, Twitter reinstated the personal account of far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, which was banned in January for violating the platform’s COVID misinformation policies.

Musk, meanwhile, has been getting increasingly chummy on Twitter with right-wing figures. Before this month’s U.S. midterm elections he urged “independent-minded” people to vote Republican.

A report from the European Union published Thursday said Twitter took longer to review hateful content and removed less of it this year compared with 2021. The report was based on data collected over the spring — before Musk acquired Twitter — as part of an annual evaluation of online platforms’ compliance with the bloc’s code of conduct on disinformation. It found that Twitter assessed just over half of the notifications it received about illegal hate speech within 24 hours, down from 82% in 2021.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – The head of Mexico’s National Guard in the state of Zacatecas was killed on Thursday in a confrontation with armed men during an operation against organized crime, authorities said.

General Jose Silvestre Urzua, one of the highest-ranking commanders of Mexico’s militarized police force and the head of its Zacatecas branch, died fulfilling his duties, Security Minister Rosa Icela Rodriguez said on Twitter.

The state prosecutor’s office said Urzua was killed during a confrontation with armed men, adding that four members of the National Guard were wounded.

The central state of Zacatecas has become one of Mexico’s most violent places because of conflicts between criminal gangs over drug trafficking. Last year, the state recorded 1,050 murders, about 200 more than in 2020.

Last month, lawmakers approved extending the role of the armed forces in public security until 2028 in an effort to curb violence. Congress has also voted to put the National Guard under army control.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador backed the creation of the National Guard after coming to power at the end of 2018, looking to fight organized crime and end endemic police corruption in its predecessor, the federal police.

Special Counsel Jack Smith just personally sent a letter to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals pointing out the lies in Donald Trump’s latest filing. That’s right, the Special Counsel is working on Thanksgiving (and yes, the filing really is dated on Thanksgiving). He’s wasting no time! Trump will be indicted soon and it’s going to be glorious.

If Smith were brought in to slow roll things or “run out the clock” or to be the one to decide not to prosecute, he wouldn’t be taking this approach. It’s clear that he’s here to be the closer, and to get the job done as swiftly as the legal system will allow.

Smith still has to wait for the appeals court to rule in his favor, perhaps another week for the Supreme Court to confirm it’s still not getting involved, and then Smith’s team has to process any seized evidence it’s just now going to receive as a result of winning this ruling.

Working through the court system is a process, it’s a complex one, there are always a number of steps to every move. But the DOJ working through that process is not “running out the clock” or “dragging their heels” or any of that nonsense. It’s just the process.

Nor can Smith just “hurry up and indict Trump already” unless you want him to indict Trump without even having secured all the seized evidence yet. It’s not about “dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s” or any of that nonsense. It’s about having the evidence and all of that.

But regardless of how much of the process is left before Trump can be successfully indicted, Smith is making a point of not falling behind by even one day.

The DOJ wasn’t “messing around” before. It’s been steadily moving forward with this court process as swiftly as it could. There have been no “pauses” or “delays.” It’s just a process in court, and the DOJ has been working through it. But Special Counsel Jack Smith is definitely not messing around.

The post Special Counsel Jack Smith makes Thanksgiving Day court filing as criminal case against Donald Trump accelerates appeared first on Palmer Report.

Once it would have been a huge news story in Boston — a hot blonde female ex-TV reporter suing her old network-owned station, accusing an older on-air talent (also female) of engaging in “unwelcome sexual harassment in the workplace.”

In fact, just such a lawsuit was filed earlier this month in federal court here, by Karen Hensel, against her former employer Channel 10, its corporate owner NBC Universal, and the ex-news director of the ratings-challenged station.

But the story vanished quickly. What once would have been the talk of the town for days, a staple of tabloid headlines — “Dream Team Turns Nightmare News!” — generated zero buzz, anywhere.

Nobody cared. Oh sure, it was tawdry stuff, but it might as well have unfolded at a local Payless shoe store, or maybe the Orange Julius at the mall. Because the local-news “talent” who were once celebrities are now almost as anonymous and interchangeable as the commuter ahead of you in the drive-through lane at Dunkin.

Television, especially local television news, is so over.

Chet and Nat are not coming through that door. Neither is Liz Walker nor Bob Lobel, or even Bob Bleepin’ Gamere. Tom Ellis and Tony Pepper, we hardly knew ye.

They used to be household names. Now there are no more than two or three anchors in Boston that anybody outside of the Marian Manor nursing home could pick out of a lineup.

The lawsuit is not actually as prurient as the headlines suggested, with all the references to sexual harassment. Essentially it involved two female workplace rivals — Hensel and a woman identified only as “Jane Doe.”

Both were assigned to what the station called its “investigative unit.”

This 2017-19 soap opera was ongoing at the station known as NBC10-Boston. They have Sunday night NFL football, and, er, that’s about it.

The newscast has reportedly been on since January 2017 and the next time I tune in will be the first. Put another way, I catch NBC10 about as often as I watch all the other local “newscasts.”

According to the lawsuit, Hensel was harassed by Jane Doe because of the older female reporter’s jealousy about, well, you can figure it out.

“Ms. Doe’s conduct and actions were designed and intended to interfere with plaintiff’s work performance and career success in an effort to make Ms. Doe out as that the leading female investigative reporter at the station.”

Remember, this pitiful also-ran outlet is owned by NBC — longtime employer of such crusading journalists as Brian Williams, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Matt Lauer, Tiffany Cross, Mike Barnicle, Joy Reid, Chuck Todd and of course the truck-demolition unit at Dateline NBC.

Remember when NBC “News” faked the Treyvon Martin 911 call? Or when they led their clownish nightly newscast with the totally bogus Julie Swetnick rape charges against Brett Cavanaugh? Or when they breathlessly reported that the FBI had been running “wiretaps” on Michael Cohen’s phones?

I could go on for days….

But you get the picture. And this was NBC’s local version of one of their vaunted “investigative” units.

Karen Hensel is, well, not bad. I had no idea who “Jane Doe” might be, but my listeners came up with a name. And when I saw Jane Doe’s publicity shot, I understood exactly why the lawsuit said she had been so obsessed with Karen.

It’s a story as old as time. Key word: old.

Anyway, amidst all the back-stabbing in the newsroom, Hensel was told by a producer to “deal with (Ms. Doe) the best you can. You know how she is.”

According to the filing, Jane Doe found out that Karen had started going out with a small-town police chief in Worcester County, and dimed her out to management. Eventually, in November 2019, Karen was fired. (She now works in Miami for the sister station of Ch. 7.)

Hensel is seeking unspecified damages for wrongful termination etc. You don’t have to be Jeffrey Toobin to know that this one will be settled out of court. The corporate suits never want any discovery in cases like this.

To make the filing even juicier, Hensel threw in another spicy R-rated tale from the dismal outlet, involving an unnamed “male assistant news director” who was allegedly tagging still another female reporter.

Just like in an old country song, this third-rate romance, low-rent rendezvous led to “a reported confrontation at the station involving the male assistant and the spouse of the on-air journalist.”

As Moe Bandy used to sing, “It’s a cheatin’ situation….”

If any of this had happened in, say, 1985, wow! Back then, both newspapers had at least one, sometimes two reporters, assigned to Boston television, not to mention different scribes just covering local TV sports news. Plus, at least on this sheet, there was also a daily gossip column that had spies in all the newsrooms.

In those days, when a second-tier TV cupcake got busted for shoplifting at Filene’s Basement, it got more ink than when an SJC justice got lugged for the exact same thing. An early-morning stabbing of a flamboyant local sports anchor in the Fens after a long booze cruise in the harbor — stop the presses!

Being in local TV news in Boston used to be like the Cheers Bar — everybody knew your name. Now, it’s like signing up for the Witness Protection Program. You’re snatched off the street, never to be seen again.

In those long-ago days when local TV news meant something in Boston, we used to joke about slogans for the stations we worked for:

“When the news breaks, we fix it.”

“If it’s news to you, it’s news to us.”

But now, nobody cares. Just ask “Jane Doe.” And it’s probably just as well.

Local TV news was always way overrated as a commodity, more by the popinjays and mountebanks in the live vans and the makeup rooms than by the bored viewers who were just looking for an up-to-date weather report and the latest scores in those halcyon pre-Internet days.

And that’s the way it is, November 25, 2022.