(NewsNation) —  Michigan State Patrol’s 6th District Lt. Michelle Robinson warns of severe temperatures, saying snow isn’t the issue.

“It’s very difficult for road crews to be able to put salt down because the temperatures are so low that the salt isn’t working,” Robinson said.

Wind conditions and icy road conditions have also caused multiple injuries across the state, according to Robinson.

Grand Rapids troopers are investigating a head-on crash involving a semi and a postal vehicle. The driver of the postal truck has been taken to the hospital with serious injuries.

(NewsNation) — This Christmas will be like no other for Tim Cornett and his wife Jeannie.

As the holiday approaches, they’re home in Indiana, where they’ll celebrate the holiday with family and a new grandson. A few months ago, however, Tim Cornett’s outlook was less bright.

At that time, the 55-year-old was surrounded by machines and doctors, and he was told there was a possibility he wouldn’t make it to Christmas.

“I couldn’t breathe at all, even with the oxygen that I had,” he said. “I could not maintain my oxygen over 60%.” 

Tim tested positive for COVID-19 in January. He then took a quick turn for the worse, eventually requiring a medically induced coma in order to receive a lung transplant. But as doctors began, they said he was too weak for the surgery.

It got worse.

After a few weeks, doctors wanted to take Tim off the ventilator. Jeannie said no.

“They told me all he needed was lungs,” she said. “I’m like, OK, if that’s all we need, then find me lungs.” 

The search took them from Indiana to Miami, where Jackson Memorial Hospital’s lung center physicians agreed to treat Tim.

“From a lung standpoint, he was with no function whatsoever. He was on the verge of death,” Dr. Juan Salgado, the critical care lead at the JMH Lung Center, said.

After months in a hospital bed and a careful transfer from Indiana to Florida, Cornett had a double-lung transplant in July, after which, for the first time in almost a year, he was able to take a deep breath.

“To be able to take my first breath without oxygen or a machine to help me was overwhelming,” he said. “I was breathing on my own and I hadn’t done that in a year.” 

He went through rehab, and after more than 170 days in Florida, made it home in October with a new lease on life and a fresh perspective this holiday season.

“My outlook on life, my priorities, have changed a lot. I missed my oldest son getting married. We missed everything, and all the milestones that we should be watching, and we didn’t,” he said. 

He gives a lot of credit to the doctors at Jackson, who took a chance on him, and of course, to Jeannie, who refused to let the ventilator keeping her husband alive to be unplugged.

Jeannie told NewsNation that if she hadn’t found the doctors in Miami, she would’ve buried her husband in February.

Now, as a family, they will get to celebrate another Christmas together.

How biased is the mainstream media is against the Democrats? We keep endlessly hearing from major media outlets (even from left leaning MSNBC) about how embarrassing it supposedly is that the Democratic Party couldn’t manage to uncover George Santos’ scandals before election day. But the media isn’t bothering to point out that the Republicans didn’t even vet their own candidate.

Most major media outlets chase political “credibility” by presenting both sides as if they were the same. It allows them to give the appearance of being unbiased, which they can use as a shield against almost any credibility questions: “Hey, we’re equally hard on both sides!”

But as a statement of fact, both sides are not the same. And these days it’s not strictly a moral difference between the inherent empathy and decency of the left and the inherent selfishness of the right. The reality of this era is that the Democratic Party runs a tight ship with relatively little individual corruption and virtually no public infighting, even as the Republican Party is largely a cesspool of corruption, offensive behavior, nonstop lies, outright criminality, and cartoon villains.

It is now impossible for the media to portray both sides as the same, without being outright dishonest about it. Major mainstream media outlets now have to bend over backward to downplay the Republicans’ corruption, ineptness, and failures, even while coming down inappropriately hard on the Democrats for every minor real or invented imperfection.

The media is now so locked into this mindset that when it was revealed that an incoming House Republican had allegedly made up nearly every aspect of his life, the media’s first instinct was to blame the Democrats for not having managed to expose the guy sooner. The media is overlooking the obvious story here, which is that the Republican Party is so overwhelmingly and inherently corrupt, no one within its ranks even cared if one of its own House candidates was essentially a fictional character.

Of course the major media outlets are also trying to cover for the fact that they failed to vet a major party candidate in a competitive House race. Isn’t that what the media is supposed to do? Major news outlets have personnel who are assigned specifically to digging up these kinds of political scandals. Yet not one reporter at one major news outlet managed to crack this story before election day? Either Santos was really good at disguising his lies, or the media did its job terribly ineptly this past election cycle.

Either way, the media is now scapegoating the Democratic Party by blaming it for not having done the media’s job. That’s unacceptable, and absurd. The Democrats may have been too busy saving democracy and working for the people to have caught onto Santos’ lies. But the Democrats will still surely review this internally and figure out how to make sure this kind of Republican coverup never gets past them again. The question is, what is the media doing to make sure it doesn’t drop the ball like this again? So far all we’re hearing from the media is deflection – and that’s not good enough.

The post The media completely dropped the ball on George Santos – and it’s trying to scapegoat the Democrats for it appeared first on Palmer Report.

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Benjamin Wittes also discussed the significance of the materials cited in the endnotes of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol’s executive summary of its final report.

Quinta Jurecic also expressed concerns about how the House Select Committee to Investigate Jan. 6’s executive summary of its final report neglects to discuss failures of U.S. law enforcement to adequately collect and disseminate intelligence to predict and respond to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Jurecic discussed the intelligence available to law enforcement and intelligence agencies prior to Jan. 6, how internal tensions within the committee could have impacted the committee’s framing of the law enforcement response, and argued that a full accounting of the response is necessary to remedy the failures of law enforcement and intelligence agencies on Jan. 6. 

Will Appleton and Tyler McBrien shared the final report of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol. 

Hadley Baker shared the final hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol where the committee summarized the findings of its investigation and voted on criminal referrals and the release of its final report:

Appleton also shared the executive summary of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol’s final report which broadly summarizes the committee’s key findings and criminal referrals. 

Katherine Pompilio shared  42 transcripts of witness testimony released by the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol. The transcripts include testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, Alex Jones, Michael Flynn, and others. 

Natalie Orpett sat down for a live event with Jurecic, Roger Parloff, Molly Reynolds, Alan Rozenshtein, and Benjamin Wittes to discuss the final hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol and the newly released executive summary of the committee’s final report:

David Priess sat down with Troy Senik, author of “A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbably Presidency of Grover Cleveland,” to chat about how former President Donald Trump’s attempts to return to the presidency compare to Grover Cleveland’s, the cases of presidents who lost their reelection bids and then tried again, how views of presidents change over time, and more:

Daniel J. Hemel discussed the House Ways and Means Committee’s decision to publish six years worth of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns following a years-long court battle, as well as a report summarizing the returns. Hemel also discussed the options available to the committee in determining what to do with the returns and the potential for the release to result in the weaponization of tax return disclosures for political ends.  

Saraphin Dhanani discussed oral arguments heard before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in a case to determine if federal prosecutors can lawfully charge three Jan. 6 defendants with corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding.

Scott R. Anderson, Jurecic, and Rozenshtein were joined by Reynolds to discuss the week’s big national security news. They discussed the criminal referrals made by the Jan. 6 Committee, the trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s prospects of becoming Speaker of the House in the next Congress, and more:

Hayley Evans discussed the resumption of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Office of the Prosecutor’s (OTP) investigation into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan. Evans outlined the dispute between the Pre-Trial Chamber II and the OTP over the scope of the investigation, the OTP’s decision to appeal a part of the Pre-Trial Chamber’s decision, and argued that, despite the resumption of the investigation, its actual scope is currently unclear. This was the second piece of her two-part series regarding the disagreement at the ICC over the Afghanistan situation.

John Bellinger discussed the criminal charges brought against Abu Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi for his role in constructing the bomb that blew up Pan Am flight 103 in 1988. Bellinger also discussed charges previously brought against other defendants who played a role in the bombing, the unusual negotiations that took place between private attorneys and the Libyan government, and argued that the current prosecution of Al-Marimi could lead to further accountability for the bombing of Pan Am 103. 

Anna Meier questioned the effectiveness of Germany’s bans of and designations on white supremacist organizations and their activities in the country. Meier explained the justification for the German law used to ban those organizations and argued that the measures perpetuate structural white supremacy while claiming to combat white supremacist activity. 

Jurecic sat down with Rodrigo Barrenechea, a visiting scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, to discuss the ongoing political crisis in Peru. They discussed the fragile state of Peruvian democracy, former Peruvian President Pedro Castillo’s attempt to dissolve Congress, and more:

Rozenshtein also sat down with Chris Slobogin, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School, to discuss how the traditional legal framework for surveillance is out of date, the importance of taking a flexible approach to what makes Fourth Amendment searches reasonable, and why it’s important for legislatures to pre-authorize any police surveillance techniques:

Stewart Baker, Josephine Wolff, and Dan Schwarcz sat down to discuss their article about the pursuit of attorney-client privilege to protect the confidentiality of forensic reports in cases of cybersecurity breaches:

Jordan Schneider discussed concerns about ByteDance’s commitment to transparency. Schneider also discussed the apparent access by ByteDance’s China-based employees to the data of American TikTok users, plans that ByteDance intended to track the location of specific American users, the influence of the Chinese Communist Party over the company and app, and more:

Stephanie Pell sat down with Tom Wheeler and Adm. (ret.) David Simpson, professor at Virginia Tech, to discuss their new paper. They discussed the 5G cyber paradox, the three specific cybersecurity challenges of 5G technology they described in the paper, and the recommendations they have for addressing these cybersecurity challenges:

Owen J. Daniels analyzed the military’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) and the “revolution in military affairs” framework for understanding the relationship between military technologies, operations, and organization. Daniels also discussed AI’s potential technological applications and the shortcomings of AI outside of a training environment.

Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith discussed provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act which President Joe Biden signed into law today, that place new restrictions on presidential authority to dismiss inspectors general, to appoint new inspectors general, and require the president to provide the explicit rationale for the dismissal of an inspector general. 

Curtis Bradley, Goldsmith, and Oona Hathaway discussed the new transparency requirements contained in the NDAA for international agreements including provisions that strengthen reporting requirements, expand publication of executive branch agreements, establish greater centralization of transparency oversight, and more. Bradley, Goldsmith, and Hathaway also discussed a number of exceptions to the new reporting requirements but argued that the provisions will lead to greater transparency. 

And Anderson also sat down with Reynolds to discuss the NDAA and the Consolidated Appropriations Act, two annual pieces of omnibus legislation. They discussed the process that led to this year’s bills, highlighted some of the notable provisions in the bill, and noted some other provisions that were left out:

And that was the week that was. 

The Jan. 6 Committee has always been clear about its two main goals. First, it wanted to show that former President Donald Trump was the main culprit behind the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, and over the course of its hearings the committee proved surprisingly effective at making that case. “The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump,” the panel wrote in its final report published Thursday night. “None of the events of Jan. 6 would have happened without him.” Even top Republicans agree the Committee made that case convincingly.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Much harder to accomplish is the committee’s second goal: ensuring nothing like Jan. 6, 2021 ever happens again.

The committee’s final report is more than 800 pages long and covers all of the House committee’s findings, based on some 1,000 interviews and hundreds of thousands of documents. The final section focuses on prescriptions for fending off similar attempts to overturn elections in the future. Here are five:

Reform the Electoral Count Act

The Electoral Count Act is a 19th Century law that Trump and his allies tried to exploit to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to Joe Biden. The act does not give the vice president the authority to unilaterally reject the election results. But the lawyer John Eastman told Trump he could use the law to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence, to nullify Biden’s win on Jan. 6.

The Jan. 6 committee, tapping into broad support among legal scholars and members of both parties in Washington, urged Congress to make clear that attempts like Eastman’s were illegal, and already that recommendation has been acted on.

On Friday, Congress passed a $1.7 trillion end-of-the-year spending bill that includes the Electoral Count Reform Act, a bipartisan Senate bill that’s designed to prevent a repeat of Jan. 6. It now heads to the desk of President Biden’s desk. The text makes clear that the vice president’s role in overseeing the Electoral College count is purely ceremonial, and it raises the threshold for members of Congress to raise objections to state results.

Prosecute those responsible for the attack

Another committee recommendation urges the Justice Department to prosecute those who ignited and aided the attack, including Trump. It comes three days after the nine-member panel voted unanimously to refer Trump and four others to the Justice Department for prosecution on four charges: attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government, conspiracy to make false statements, and incitement of insurrection. The referrals have no legal weight and don’t force DOJ to act. No congressional committee has ever before made such a declaration against a former president.

Prevent Trump and other insurrectionists from holding office

The committee recommends invoking the 14th Amendment to stop anyone who engaged in the insurrection, particularly Trump, from holding state or federal office. To do that, the committee wants congressional committees of jurisdiction to consider “creating a formal mechanism” to bar those individuals who participated in the Jan. 6 coup attempt from gaining the reins of government power.

The constitutional provision says that anyone who has “engaged in an insurrection” or given “aid or comfort to the enemies of the Constitution” can be disqualified from holding office at the federal or state level.

The House panel also called on the federal government to conduct a “whole-of-government” strategy to combat violent extremism. The committee wants federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to review their intelligence sharing protocols to ensure they can respond to emerging threats—especially against legislatures, government bodies, and minority groups—promptly.

Toughen the penalties for those who try to sabotage elections

The committee’s final report urges harsher punishment for anyone who tries to meddle with American elections. It recommends stiffening penalties for anyone who threatens election workers or attempts to interfere with the Congressional certification of the electoral college vote.

Increase the power of Congressional investigators

The Jan. 6 Committee also recommends beefing up the House of Representatives’ subpoena powers. While many in Trump’s inner orbit provided powerful testimony for the panel’s probe, several of the former president’s closest allies spurned their subpoenas and faced no consequences, such as former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Republican members of Congress Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan.

Former federal prosecutors say that such a change would give Congress a greater ability to get at the truth, not just in this investigation but in future ones. “There’s no difference in legal compulsion between a congressional [subpoena] and a DOJ one,” says Harry Litman, a former U.S. attorney, “but you have people cynically defy them knowing that the committee would only go for two years and time would run out. And so the committee was left almost powerless to use its subpoena powers.”

The Jan. 6 committee’s final act

The recommendations put forth by the Jan. 6 committee were not exhaustive. The panel encouraged legislators to consider reforms to the Insurrection Act, which Trump weighed invoking to seize election machines after the election, without offering any specifics. It also called for the Congress to “evaluate policies of media companies that have had the effect of radicalizing their consumers, including by provoking people to attack their own country.” And lastly, the report pushed for increased oversight of the Capitol Police, to ensure adequate “planning, training, equipping, and intelligence processes.”

The report is the committee’s final act before dissolving ahead of the new Congress, when Republicans take control of the House.

The tome is broken down into eight chapters that cover the major themes addressed during the committee’s investigative hearings held over the summer and fall. They include narrative accounts of how several top administration officials told Trump that his claims of voter fraud were baseless; how Trump pressured Vice President Pence and state election officials to nullify Biden’s victory; how he tried to corrupt the Justice Department to sow doubt in the election outcome; and his unwillingness to call off his mob of supporters who stormed the Capitol.

Trump has repeatedly dismissed the Jan. 6 committee hearings—which drew more than 20 million prime-time viewers over the course of the spring and summer—as a “partisan witch hunt.” On Friday morning, he remained defiant in the face of a damning report, while still promulgating the misinformation that the Jan. 6 Committee argued led to the deadly attack.

“The Government of the United States changed our Election Result, and it just doesn’t get any worse than that,” he posted on his social media platform Truth Social on Friday morning. “Just look at the damage that’s been done to our Country, and the World, in the last two years—it’s incalculable. TRUMP WON!!!”

When Brittney Griner was detained by Putin, this country was in anguish. Except for Maga. When Brittney Griner was released (Thank you, President Biden) the country celebrated — except for Maga. When Volodymyr Zelenskyy stood before Congress, speaking of how Ukraine would never back down, we celebrated. Except for Maga.

Perhaps you see it too. I speak of the slow turning, the indoctrination, the transition into useful idiots of Putin — that has come to be Maga. Maga has morphed into useful idiots — of one Vladimir Putin.

It is, undoubtedly, exactly what Putin wants. He lives to stir up conflict. And in a small portion of America, it has happened. This small portion — call them deplorable or Maga or just traitors, have reached the turning point where they are openly cheering for and defending Putin.

They lack the ability to even realize what they have done — how they have been created by Russian propaganda, existing as no more than Putin’s weapons of hatred, always ready and willing to defend the Russian monster.

Brainwashing is often subtle. It did take years for Maga to get to this point, but now they’re here. It should shake up anyone with morals and conscience to see the reactions we have seen from Maga. It isn’t just that they exhibit outrage. It is WHO they choose to defend. It is to WHO their loyalties seem the strongest. It certainly isn’t this country.

I suppose one of the worst offenders is Donald Trump Junior, who called Zelenskyy on Twitter, a “welfare queen.” It is nauseating. But it also makes me wonder. What if Putin called upon Americans to right for him? What if Donald Trump echoed those calls? Would Maga go?

Is there ANYTHING Maga would not do if asked to by our enemies? That is what truly makes all of this so frightening. Ukraine is winning the war that Putin started against them. However, it would seem that Putin HAS won the battle of turning Maga.

The post These MAGA loons are even further gone than we thought appeared first on Palmer Report.

Professor Mats Berdal, Professor of Protection and Growth in the Office of War Studies, talks about the implications of …

supply

The post War Studies Insights: Professor Mats Berdal on the UN Peacekeeping Summit appeared first on Ukraine Intelligence.

Daystar Peterson, the Canadian rapper known as Tory Lanez, was found guilty by a Los Angeles jury on Friday of shooting fellow artist Megan Thee Stallion in both of her feet after an argument in 2020, prosecutors said.

The jury found Lanez, 30, guilty of three felony counts: carrying a loaded and unregistered firearm in a vehicle; assault with a semiautomatic handgun; and discharging a firearm with gross negligence. Lanez faces over 20 years in prison.

A lawyer for Megan Thee Stallion said after the verdict: “The jury got it right. I am thankful there is justice for Meg.”

Grammy-winning rapper Megan Thee Stallion, 27, had earlier testified she had been shot in the feet after leaving a pool party.

Sentencing was scheduled for Jan. 27, the New York Times reported. Megan Thee Stallion was not present in court on Friday. Lanez, who had been free on bail during the trial following a period of house arrest, was immediately taken into custody, the newspaper said.

Jurors reached a verdict on Friday after hours of deliberation across two days after a trial of about two weeks.

Twitter Inc removed a feature in the past few days that promoted suicide prevention hotlines and other safety resources to users looking up certain content, according to two people familiar with the matter who said it was ordered by new owner Elon Musk.

After publication of this story, Twitter head of trust and safety Ella Irwin told Reuters in an email that “we have been fixing and revamping our prompts. They were just temporarily removed while we do that.”

“We expect to have them back up next week,” she said.

The removal of the feature, known as #ThereIsHelp, had not been previously reported. It had shown at the top of specific searches contacts for support organizations in many countries related to mental health, HIV, vaccines, child sexual exploitation, COVID-19, gender-based violence, natural disasters and freedom of expression.

Its elimination had led to increased concerns about the well-being of vulnerable users on Twitter. Musk has said that impressions, or views, of harmful content are declining since he took over in October and has tweeted graphs showing a downward trend, even as researchers and civil rights groups have tracked an increase in tweets with racial slurs and other hateful content.

In part due to pressure from consumer safety groups, internet services including Twitter, Google and Facebook have for years tried to direct users to well-known resource providers such as government hotlines when they suspect someone may be in danger.

In her email, Twitter’s Irwin said, “Google does really well with these in their search results and (we) are actually mirroring some of their approach with the changes we are making.”

She added, “We know these prompts are useful in many cases and just want to make sure they are functioning properly and continue to be relevant.”

Eirliani Abdul Rahman, who had been on a recently dissolved Twitter content advisory group, said the disappearance of #ThereIsHelp was “extremely disconcerting and profoundly disturbing.”

Even if it was only temporarily removed to make way for improvements, “normally you would be working on it in parallel, not removing it,” she said.

Washington-based AIDS United, which was promoted in #ThereIsHelp, and iLaw, a Thai group mentioned for freedom of expression support, both told Reuters on Friday that the disappearance of the feature was a surprise to them.

AIDS United said a webpage that the Twitter feature linked to attracted about 70 views a day until Dec. 18. Since then, it has drawn 14 views in total.

Damar Juniarto, executive director at Twitter partner Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network, tweeted on Friday about the missing feature and said “stupid actions” by the social media service could lead his organization to abandon it.

The sources with knowledge of Musk’s decision to order the removal of the feature declined to be named because they feared retaliation. One of them said millions of people had encountered #ThereIsHelp messages.

Twitter had launched some prompts about five years ago and some had been available in over 30 countries, according to company tweets. In one of its blog posts about the feature, Twitter had said it had responsibility to ensure users could “access and receive support on our service when they need it most.”

Alex Goldenberg, lead intelligence analyst at the non-profit Network Contagion Research Institute, said prompts that had shown in search results just days ago were no longer visible by Thursday.

He and colleagues in August published a study showing that monthly mentions on Twitter of some terms associated with self-harm increased by over 500% from about the year before, with younger users particularly at risk when seeing such content.

“If this decision is emblematic of a policy change that they no longer take these issues seriously, that’s extraordinarily dangerous,” Goldenberg said. “It runs counter Musk’s previous commitments to prioritize child safety.”

Musk has said he wants to combat child sexual abuse content on Twitter and has criticized the previous ownership’s handling of the issue. But he has cut large portions of the teams involved in dealing with potentially objectionable material.