(NewsNation) — The retired Marine who has been in a Russian prison for four years is in an all-too-familiar position — unsure when he will be free.

Ever since WNBA star Brittney Griner was arrested for drug possession, rumors have circulated that the U.S. could negotiate a deal with Moscow to free Whelan and the Olympic basketball player by returning notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout to Russia.

But Thursday, the U.S. swapped Bout for Griner straight up.

“It’s been a hard couple of days,” Paul Whelan’s brother, David Whelan, said on “NewsNation Prime” Saturday.

Though David Whelan said the U.S. was “very kind” to reach out to Paul and their family to warn them about Griner’s release before the press reported it, David admitted it’s a tough pill to swallow.

He said Paul had heard the rumors that he may be freed soon.

“I’m sure he’s recalibrating his own mental state so he can survive until his day comes,” David Whelan said.

Paul Whelan was sentenced to 16 years in prison in June 2020 for espionage, though he insists he’s not a spy and was in Russia for a wedding when he was arrested in 2018.

The State Department insists they’re not giving up on him.

“This is something we’re going to continue to work for because there is no greater priority for the State Department than ensuring the safety and security of Americans who are being wrongly detained or held hostage and getting them home safely,” spokesperson Vedant Patel said on “NewsNation Prime” Saturday.

Japan needs to increase its military spending in the face of the “grim reality” of the threat from China and North Korea, a senior member of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party said on Sunday during a visit to Taiwan.

Although Chinese-claimed and democratically-governed Taiwan and Japan do not have formal diplomatic ties, they have close unofficial relations and both share concerns about China, especially its increased military activities near the two.

Koichi Hagiuda, the LDP’s policy chief and a former industry minister, said during a visit to Taipei that since World War Two Japan has “walked the path of peace” and that path will not change in the future.

“However just reciting the word peace is of course not enough for our peace to be protected,” he told a forum on Japan-Taiwan relations.

As Japan prepares next year’s budget Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has already announced plans to lift defence spending to an amount equivalent to 2% of gross domestic product within five years, from 1% now.

That would take Japan’s annual defence budget to more than 11 trillion yen ($80.55 billion) from 5.4 trillion yen currently, giving the country the world’s third-largest military budget after the United States and China at their current levels.

Hagiuda pointed to China’s massive increase in military spending, as well as North Korean missile tests, as reasons for Japan to raise its defence budget.

“In the face of such a grim reality, half measures have no meaning at all.”

Japan’s defence capabilities are necessary to protect lives and peace and must be developed immediately, not within five years, he added.

“It’s important to show clearly that we have sufficient capacity to make any would-be aggressor think twice.”

China staged military drills near Taiwan in August to express anger at a visit to Taipei by then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, including launching five missiles into the sea close to Okinawa, within Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

Japan hosts major U.S. military bases, including on Okinawa, a short flight from Taiwan, which would be crucial for any U.S. support during a Chinese attack.

The United States is bound by law to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself, though there is ambiguity about whether it would send forces to help Taiwan in a war with China.

Addressing a think-tank in Taiwan last December, the late former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Japan and the United States could not stand by if China attacked Taiwan, and Beijing needs to understand this.

($1 = 136.5600 yen)

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Beijing’s COVID-19 gloom deepened on Sunday with many shops and other businesses closed, and an expert warned of many thousands of new coronavirus cases as anger over China’s previous COVID policies gave way to worry about coping with infection.

China dropped most of its strict COVID curbs on Wednesday after unprecedented protests against them last month, but cities that were already battling with their most severe outbreaks, like Beijing, saw a sharp decrease in economic activity after rules such as regular testing were scrapped.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that many businesses have been forced to close as infected workers quarantine at home while many other people are deciding not to go out because of the higher risk of infection.

Zhong Nanshan, a prominent Chinese epidemiologist, told state media that the Omicron strain of the virus prevalent in China was highly transmissible and one infected person could spread it to as many as 18 others.

“We can see that hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of people are infected in several major cities,” Zhong said.

With regular COVID testing of Beijing residents scrapped and reserved only for groups such as health workers, official tallies for new cases have plunged.

Health authorities reported 1,661 new infections for Beijing Saturday, down 42% from 3,974 on Dec. 6, a day before national policies were dramatically relaxed.

But evidence suggests there are many more cases in the city of nearly 22 million people where everyone seems to know someone who has caught COVID.

“In my company, the number of people who are COVID-negative is close to zero,” said one women who works for a tourism and events firm in Beijing who asked to be identified as just Nancy.

“We realise this can’t be avoided – everyone will just have to work from home,” she said.

Sunday is a normal business day for shops in Beijing and it is usually bustling, particularly in spots like the historic Shichahai neighbourhood packed with boutiques and cafes.

But few people were out and about on Sunday and malls in Chaoyang, Beijing’s most populous district, were practically deserted with many salons, restaurants and retailers shut.

Economists widely expect China’s road to economic health to be uneven as shocks such as labour crunches due to workers calling in sick delay a full-fledged recovery for some time yet.

“The transition out of zero-COVID will eventually allow consumer spending patterns to return to normal, but a higher risk of infection will keep in-person spending depressed for months after re-opening,” Mark Williams, chief Asia economist at Capital Economics, said in a note.

China’s economy may grow 1.6% in the first quarter of 2023 from a year earlier, and 4.9% in the second, according to Capital Economics.

Epidemiologist Zhong also said it would be some months before a return to normal.

“My opinion is in the first half of next year, after March,” he said.

While China has removed most of its domestic COVID curbs, its international borders are still largely closed to foreigners, including tourists.

Inbound travellers are subjected to five days of quarantine at centralised government facilities and three additional days of self-monitoring at home.

But there are even hints that that rule could change.

Staff at the main international airport in Chengdu city, asked if quarantine rules were being eased, said that as of Saturday whether or not one needed to do the three days of home quarantine would depend on a person’s neighbourhood authorities.

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Ukraine’s military said Russia had pulled some troops from towns on the opposite bank of the Dnipro River from Kherson city, the first official Ukrainian report of a Russian withdrawal on what is now the main front line in the south..

* Spain has stepped up security at public and diplomatic buildings after a spate of letter bombs, including one sent to Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and another to the Ukrainian embassy in Madrid, where an official suffered minor injuries.

* Air raid alerts were issued across all of Ukraine following warnings by Ukrainian officials that Russia was preparing a new wave of missile and drone strikes. “An overall air raid alert is in place in Ukraine. Go to shelters,” country’s border service wrote on Telegram messaging app.

* Ukraine’s military said it had found fragments of Russian-fired nuclear-capable missiles with dud warheads in west Ukraine, and that their apparent purpose was to distract air defences.

* The recently liberated Ukrainian city of Kherson has lost its power supply after heavy shelling by Russian forces, the regional governor said.

* European Union governments tentatively agreed on a $60 a barrel price cap on Russian seaborne oil, with an adjustment mechanism to keep the cap at 5% below the market price, an EU diplomat said.

* Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on that big problems had accumulated in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), accusing the West of spurning the chance to make it a real bridge with Russia after the Cold War.

* Lavrov said that discussions with Washington about potential prisoner exchanges were being conducted by the two countries’ intelligence services, and that he hoped they would be successful.

* The European Union needs patience as it sanctions Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, as most measures will only have an impact in the medium and long term, Lithuania’s prime minister said in an interview at  the  Reuters NEXT conference.

* Switzerland has frozen financial assets worth 7.5 billion Swiss francs ($7.94 billion) as of Nov. 25 under sanctions against Russians to punish Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine, the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) said.

* Russia said the German parliament’s move to recognise the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine as a Soviet-imposed genocide was an anti-Russian provocation and an attempt by Germany to whitewash its Nazi past.

* Ukraine sacked a top engineer at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, accusing him of collaborating with Russian forces, and urged other Ukrainian staff at the plant to remain loyal to Kyiv.

* Russia must withdraw its heavy weapons and military personnel from the Zaporizhzhia plant if the U.N. atomic watchdog’s efforts to create a protection zone are to succeed, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said.

* In a grim sign of the energy crisis caused by Russian attacks on Ukraine’s electricity grid, nine people have been killed in fires over the past 24 hours as Ukrainians resorted to emergency generators, candles and gas cylinders in violation of safety rules to try to heat their homes after power outages.

* “Remember one thing – the Russians are afraid. And they are very cold and no one will help them, because they do not have popular support,” – Andriy Yermak, chief of Ukrainian presidential staff.

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I have been wanting to write about this subject for so long. The GOP — and their love of the pale. Allow me to elaborate. The GOP puzzles over why they can no longer win elections. And one of those reasons is their thin-veiled racism. In fact, it’s a lot of reason.

The GOP has been unable to condemn the racism of noted antisemitic people. Even the (few) who DID condemn it did it tepidly, barely able to voice dissent lest their rule-in-chief hear about it and mock them. The racism of the GOP was omnipresent in the 2022 midterms. Let’s take a look at that.

They ran Herschel Walker. They naively thought Georgians would vote for him simply because he is a minority. It really shows their ignorance about just how they view minorities.

Some republicans, in campaign commercials, reportedly darkened the skin of candidates like Val Demings and Mandela Barnes. See, their whole thing is — Black person bad. And there were racist undertones in many of the ads. For example, let’s look at one ad against Mandela Barnes. It showed an image of him with “the squad.”

Now you are likely aware that all the women of “the squad” — AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib are women of color. Underneath the image were the words: “Mandela Barnes, different.” Then the word changed and became “Mandela Barnes, dangerous.”

Over and over, month after month, we see republicans playing the race card. It’s insulting, evil, and ignorant. The GOP also showed their contempt for women. And they showed their contempt for the LGBTQ community.

So, to bring it home — the GOP keeps losing because they are aligned with one group and one group only. White Christian men. Men with pale skin tones — a whiter shade of pale — the whitest shade of pale.

The GOP insults the intelligence of their voters time after time after time. They showed it in the midterms. They showed it in the Georgia special election. They continue to show it in their inability to denounce people like Kanye West, Donald Trump, and Nick Fuentes. If the GOP wants to court minority votes, they need to understand minorities. If the GOP wants to court females, they need to understand them. But they do not.

Look to Samuel Alito to see the type of voter Republicans understand. Look toward the white Christian man to understand who republicans identify with. They are a small tent party with rapidly dwindling returns because they simply do not care about their own voters — and that is the reason for their continued losses.

The post Whiter shade of pale appeared first on Palmer Report.

(NewsNation) — The lawyer who represented notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout says Americans can rest easy even though his client is back home in Russia as part of a prisoner swap that freed Brittney Griner.

“The thing he wants to do more than anything is put his family back together,” Steve Zissou said on “NewsNation Prime” Saturday.

Zissou has long said Bout’s role in the arms business was overblown, and said the swap for Griner was “absolutely” fair.

Critics of the trade point to the crimes Bout and Griner were convicted of. Griner, a WNBA player who joined a team in Russia to supplement her income, was caught with hashish oil in her suitcase at a Russian airport.

Bout was serving a 25-year sentence for conspiring to sell tens of millions of dollars worth of weapons to militias and terrorists. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and Tho Police lured Bout in a sting operation.

But Zissou has previously told NewsNation that operation was a trap. And retired U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin, who presided over Bout’s trial and sentenced him, said this summer she would have given him fewer than 25 years if statutes allowed.

There are other Americans in Russian jails, including retired Marine Paul Whelan and teacher Marc Fogel, and some had hoped freeing Bout could bring more than Griner back to America.

Zissou said that may have been true at one point, but not any more.

“The U.S. government waited too long to be willing to trade Viktor,” he reasons, because his sentence was more than half over.

Now, Zissou says Bout is a compassionate man.

“He’s a very spiritual guy,” Zissou said. “He loves talking about antiquity. He cares about his fellow person. My guess is, and I’ve discussed it with him, he’s going to get involved in helping other Russians get free from U.S. jails.”

He’s skeptical Bout could re-enter the arms dealer game if he wanted to, saying Bout left it before the sting and the industry is controlled by countries now.

“Does the U.S. have anything to fear from him? Absolutely not,” Zissou said.

Ukraine attacked occupied Melitopol in the country’s southeast on Saturday evening, the Russian-installed and exiled Ukrainian authorities of the strategically located city said.

The pro-Moscow authorities said a missile attack killed two people and injured 10, while the exiled mayor said scores of “invaders” were killed.

Reuters could not independently verify the reports of the attacks or deaths.

“Air defence systems destroyed two missiles, four reached their targets,” Yevgeny Balitsky, the Moscow-appointed governor of the occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia region, said on the Telegram messaging app.

He said a “recreation centre” where people were dining was destroyed in the Ukrainian attack with HIMARS missiles.

The exiled mayor, Ivan Fedorov, said on his Telegram channel that the attack hit a church that Russians had turned into a gathering place.

Vladimir Rogov, another Moscow-installed official in the Russian-controlled part of Zaporizhzhia, said a big fire caused by the strike engulfed the recreation centre. He posted a video of a structure in flames.

HIMARS multiple rocket launchers have been among Ukraine’s most effective weapons in the war, delivering precision fire on hundreds of targets, including Russian command posts. On Friday, the United States said it was sending more aid to Kyiv to strengthen its air defences and defeat drones.

An adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Oleksiy Arestovych, said Melitopol, a major industrial and transport centre occupied by Russia since March, is key to the defence of the south.

“All logistics linking the Russian forces on the eastern part of the Kherson region and all the way to the Russian border near Mariupol is carried out through it,” Arestovych said in a video interview on social media.

“If Melitopol falls, the entire defence line all the way to Kherson collapses. Ukrainian forces gain a direct route to Crimea.”

There was no immediate comment from the Ukrainian army about the attacks. Earlier in the day, the central command of the Ukraine’s Armed Forces said it had been conducting strikes on Melitopol.

There’s this notion out there that Kyrsten Sinema has fortified herself by shifting to the right. She has not. In Arizona she’s polling at 37% with Democrats, 36% with Republicans, 41% with independents, according to one poll. There are no recent polls showing anything different.

No one wants her. If her numbers stay this bad or get worse, Democrats might as well run someone against her in a three-way race in 2024, because she’d lose in a two-way race anyway. There’s a theoretical chance she could pull her head out of her backside at some point and get her numbers up. But there’s no indication she’s going to wake up.

If Sinema’s pitiful numbers do improve before 2024, then the Democrats will have to consider sitting back and letting her win reelection. But if her numbers stay this bad or worse, which is more likely, then the Democrats would have nothing to lose by making it a three way race.

The Republicans will likely pick a candidate who only appeals to the right. So if the left and center are left choosing between Gallego and Sinema, most of them will vote for Gallego.

Sinema could end up getting some single digit percent of the vote and not being a major factor in the outcome either way. That sounds almost unfathomable for an incumbent Senator. But again, this is someone who is so unpopular with her own party’s voters that she’s ditching the party label in a last ditch effort at avoiding a primary challenge, and she’s no more popular with the other side’s voters either.

Show me an Arizona voter who’s going to choose Sinema over Gallego. Show me an Arizona voter who’s going to choose Sinema over the Republican. As things now stand, she’a looking at a distant third. All Sinema has is the incumbency advantage. Without that she’d get virtually no votes at all.

The question is ultimately this: what are the odds of Sinema winning in a two way race, vs what are the odds of a real Democrat winning in a three way race? Democratic Party will make a decision based mainly on those two numbers. These things are ultimately just math.

We’ll see how those numbers shift over the next year plus. But for now, it would be faulty to just presume that Sinema would win a two way race. It would also be faulty to presume that Democrats’ odds would be worse in a three way race than in a two way race. Sinema is borderline non-viable for 2024 already. And given her trajectory it’s difficult to imagine her doing anything between now and 2024 that would help her popularity.

The post Kyrsten Sinema can run but she can’t hide from her terrible 2024 numbers appeared first on Palmer Report.

Donald Trump melted down on Friday morning on Truth Social, insisting that the documents he stole “should be returned at once.” That’s one way to piss off the Justice Department; I’ll give him that.

Trump is running on empty these days. But Friday’s meltdown was insane, too, even by his standards. Thanking Elon Musk profusely for revealing the “truth”, Trump proceeded to insult:

The FBI

The President

The Justice Department

Twitter

Donald Trump is insane. We know that. But here’s also having issues with his lawyers. None of them appear to want to sign off on the fact that all classified documents have, in fact, been returned. That is likely because they probably HAVEN’T Been.

One of the problems is that Trump’s legal team will not apparently designate a “custodian of records” — someone to sign a document ensuring that all documents have been returned.

One knows it’s pretty bad when one’s own lawyers will not commit to their client not being a liar. But how could the lawyers commit to that? If they did, they would likely be in a lot of trouble since anyone with a brain knows that Trump is, in all likelihood, holding onto plenty more documents.

And in the meantime, the Department of Justice is asking that Trump be held in contempt. That is likely because Trump’s got this little hobby of lying to everyone about everything, and nothing seems to be able to change that. And every day, the man loses it a bit more.

Word is the Justice Department is losing patience with him. And so, yes, Trump has had yet another terrible week. Each week lately, seems to get worse for him. I wonder what next week has in store.

The post Donald Trump throws complete tantrum as his legal troubles finally close in on him appeared first on Palmer Report.

Nato head warns the war could spin out of control and Ukrainian president says eastern city of Bakhmut has been ‘destroyed’

• See all our Ukraine war coverage

The fighting in Ukraine could spin out of control and become a war between Russia and Nato, the head of the alliance said in an interview with Norwegian broadcaster NRK. “If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong,” Jens Stoltenberg said.

Iran’s backing for the Russian military is likely to grow in coming months and Moscow will probably offer Tehran an “unprecedented” level of military support in return, the UK Ministry of Defence has said. The ministry’s latest intelligence update said Iran had become one of Russia’s top military backers since Russia invaded Ukraine in February and that Moscow was trying to obtain more weapons, including hundreds of ballistic missiles.

Russian forces have “destroyed” the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said, while Ukraine’s military reported missile, rocket and airstrikes in multiple parts of the country. The latest battles of Russia’s nine and a half-month war in Ukraine have centred on four provinces that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, illegally claimed to have annexed in late September.

Heavy fighting has continued in eastern and southern Ukraine, mainly in regions that Russia illegally annexed in September. Ukraine’s presidential office said on Friday that five civilians had been killed and another 13 wounded by Russian shelling in the past 24 hours.

Boris Johnson has urged western countries to “look urgently” at what more they can do to support Ukraine in the hopes of ending the war against Russia as soon as next year. The former UK prime minister, who was hailed by Zelenskiy as a key ally, used an article in the Wall Street Journal to argue that ending the war as soon as possible is “in everyone’s interest, including Russia”.

Russia wants to turn Ukraine into a “dependent dictatorship” like Belarus, the wife of jailed Belarusian Nobel peace prize laureate Ales Bialiatski said on Saturday upon receiving the prize on his behalf, speaking his words. Bialiatski, the Russian rights group Memorial and Ukraine’s Centre for Civil Liberties won the 2022 prize in October.

Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, said the government would place targeted sanctions on Russia and Iran in response to what it called “egregious” human rights violations.

Moscow has announced it is banning 200 Canadian officials from entering Russia in response to similar sanctions from Ottawa. The health minister, Jean-Yves Duclos, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce head, Victor Dodig, were among those targeted.

All non-critical infrastructure in Ukraine’s southern port city of Odesa were without power after Russia used drones to hit energy facilities, local officials said, with much of the surrounding region also affected.

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