A deep freeze enveloping most of the United States early on Friday combined with a massive winter storm brewing in the Midwest to leave two-thirds of the nation under extreme weather alerts, confounding travel plans for millions of Americans.

Heading into the Christmas holiday weekend, the looming storm was forecast to develop into a “bomb cyclone,” unleashing heavy, blinding snow from the northern Plains and Great Lakes region to the upper Mississippi Valley and western New York.

Numbing cold intensified by high winds was expected to extend as far south as the U.S.-Mexico border.

Hard-freeze warnings were posted across the Gulf Coast states of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida, while significant icing was possible from a separate arctic blast hitting the Pacific Northwest.

By late Thursday, most of the Lower 48 states, from Washington state to Florida, were under wind-chill alerts, blizzard warnings or other winter weather advisories affecting more than 200 million people, about 60% of the U.S. population, the National Weather Service (NWS) reported.

The NWS map of existing or impending wintry hazards, stretching from border to border and coast to coast, “depicts one of the greatest extents of winter weather warnings and advisories ever,” the agency said.

The bomb cyclone could unleash snowfalls of a half inch (1.25 cm) per hour driven by gale-force winds, cutting visibility to near zero, the weather service said.

Combined with the arctic cold, wind-chill factors as low as 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (minus 40 Celsius) were forecast in the High Plains, the northern Rockies and the Great Basin, the NWS said. Exposure to such conditions without adequate protection can cause frostbite within minutes.

Power outages were expected from high winds, heavy snow and ice, as well as the strain of higher-than-usual energy demands.

One of the greatest immediate impacts, even before the storm fully took shape, was the upending of commercial air traffic during the busy holiday travel period.

More than 5,000 U.S. flights scheduled for Thursday and Friday were canceled, with two major airports in Chicago accounting for nearly 1,300 of the cancellations, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware.

One would-be holiday traveler, Brandon Mattis, 24, said Thursday his flight from New York City to Atlanta was canceled due to the coming storm, leaving him “flustered” at LaGuardia Airport in Queens.

Mattis said he searched for alternate routes and was even considering a 21-hour bus ride to Atlanta. “Anything we can do just to get there, we’re going to do,” he told Reuters.

The American Automobile Association had estimated that 112.7 million people planned to travel 50 miles (80 km) or more from home between Dec. 23 and Jan. 2, up 3.6 million travelers over last year and closing in on pre-pandemic numbers.

But that number was likely to be diminished by air and road travel complicated by treacherous weather leading into the weekend.

Even U.S. President Biden urged Americans to think twice about venturing out after Thursday, calling the gathering storm “dangerous and threatening.”

“This is not like a snow day, when you were a kid, this is serious stuff,” he said in comments at the White House on Thursday.

The extreme cold also posed a particular hazard to livestock in ranching-intensive regions of the country. Tyson Foods Inc (TSN.N), the nation’s leading meat producer by sales, said it had scaled back operations to protect employees and animals.

The weather service said relief from the deep freeze was in sight for the northern Rockies and High Plains, where the arctic blast first materialized on Thursday. Temperatures in parts of those regions could rebound by 40 to 60 degrees over the weekend as the cold air mass creeps farther east.

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Fiji’s Social Democratic Liberal Party (SODELPA) said on Friday that it would form a coalition with two other parties, a move that will dislodge current Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama.

“We believe we have agreed on a way forward that benefits this country,” party leader Viliame Gavoka said in a news conference after an internal party vote.

The Pacific island nation’s military was called in on Thursday to help police maintain law and order. read more

To an outsider, it may seem an unlikely time for Ukraine to double down on the battle against corruption, as missiles rain down on cities and citizens fight for their lives.

Nonetheless, anti-graft agencies have revived a years-old investigation into an official scheme they say led to electricity customers overpaying by more than $1 billion, plus a case that stalled in 2020 into the alleged theft of over $350 million in assets and funds from a state-controlled oil company.

They’ve launched new actions too, including this month the arrest in absentia of an ex-state bank boss over his suspected role in the embezzlement of $5 million. He denies wrongdoing.

“Every week, there are one or two big developments plus seven or eight smaller ones that are still important,” said legal expert Vadym Valko, who monitors the work of anti-corruption authorities in Ukraine, which is fighting to rid itself of oligarchs and strengthen its vulnerable institutions.

The activity reflects a parallel war Kyiv is waging against high-level graft, according to Reuters interviews with half a dozen Ukrainian anti-corruption monitors and officials. The drive is deemed urgent enough for the government to devote resources to, even during Russia’s invasion.

Indeed, anti-corruption agencies flag their work almost daily in a flurry of statements and social media posts. In November alone, they reported having launched investigations into 44 new criminal cases, issued 17 notices of suspicion to people being investigated and sent six indictments to court.

In 2022, prosecutors have filed at least 109 indictments in 42 cases, the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) told Reuters, adding that 25 convictions had been handed down.

The work can’t wait, according to the people interviewed, because curbing endemic corruption is key to reassuring Western partners preparing to send tens of billions of dollars of aid that will be needed to rebuild the country in coming years.

It would also be crucial, they say, to winning a status that guarantees Ukraine’s long-term security from any future aggression: membership of the European Union, which says getting on top of graft is a must for candidacy talks to begin.

“It’s extraordinarily important right now for Ukraine to demonstrate itself as a predictable partner,” said Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, first deputy head of the parliamentary committee on anti-corruption policy, referring to Western donors.

“In reality there are two wars going on in Ukraine at once: an open one with Russia, and another with the post-Soviet corrupt past that’s happening within.”

The anti-corruption drive is backed by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who vowed this month that Ukraine would fight both high-level corruption and Russia’s invasion at the same time.

“The story of reform continues,” the actor turned wartime leader, who was elected in 2019 on pledges to clean up Ukraine, said in his nightly address.

“It continues even during this kind of war.”

Anti-corruption efforts, which continued after the Feb. 24 invasion, were stepped up over the summer under a new director of SAPO, according to the experts and officials.

Oleksandr Klymenko took the position in July after Zelenskiy publicly demanded that his appointment be confirmed because the committee that had selected him more than half a year earlier still hadn’t formally signed off on the move.

“Without a full-fledged head of such an institution, its full-fledged functioning is impossible,” Zelenskiy said at the time.

Klymenko has provided the administrative muscle to kickstart some cases that had been gathering dust, while also advancing new ones, the people said.

For example, SAPO announced in late September that Klymenko had reopened the case over the scheme that allegedly overcharged electricity consumers. It had been repeatedly opened and closed for two years due to procedural errors and shortcomings, SAPO prosecutors said at the time of the hold-ups.

In announcing its revival, Klymenko’s office said the case files hadn’t been reviewed by prosecutors thoroughly enough and assigned a new team to the investigation, which involves at least 15 suspects, mostly current and former officials.

In late October, anti-corruption officials announced they had issued new notices of suspicion in the case, when suspects are informed they are being investigated.

In the alleged plot to take more than $350 million from the oil company, prosecutors in early September issued eight people with notices of suspicion that had been awaiting approval from SAPO since early 2020.

New anti-corruption cases include a probe launched in October into a former tax chief suspected of taking more than $20 million in kickbacks. Reuters was unable to contact the ex-official for comment.

A SAPO spokesperson said Klymenko was not prepared to comment on his work. The agency did not comment on the individual cases and the recent flurry of activity, but said it was currently working on 693 cases with its sister agency, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU).

PROSECUTORS: $2,500 A MONTH

The United States, which is supplying Ukraine with billions of dollars of weaponry to fight Russia, supports Kyiv’s concurrent drive to root out corruption.

“We are actively engaged with the government of Ukraine to ensure accountability, even amidst the challenging conflict environment,” a U.S. State Department spokesperson said.

There is the prospect of more money on the way as donors weigh the scale of their contributions to Ukraine’s anticipated reconstruction, a project largely dependent on foreign aid.

Central Bank Governor Andriy Pyshnyi said this month he expected 18 billion euros ($19 billion) from the EU and $10 billion from Washington next year in immediate budgetary aid alone.

Beating graft won’t be easy in a country where experts say much of it is rooted in the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Despite the progress of recent years, Ukraine still ranks 122 out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s latest Corruption Perceptions Index.

Andrii Borovyk, executive director of Transparency’s Ukraine office, welcomed the current anti-corruption drive but said the true measures of success would be the number of convictions and the state’s success in recovering proceeds from corruption as well as its enforcement of asset declarations.

“We’ll need to see what the final output will be,” he told Reuters.

The stakes have never been higher since Kyiv embarked on an anti-graft campaign after the 2014 “Maidan” revolution cemented Ukraine’s pro-European course.

Both SAPO and NABU were established in 2015. SAPO oversees investigations launched by NABU and sends them to the anti-corruption court, which began its work in 2019.

Collectively, they comprise the core of Ukraine’s anti-graft law enforcement infrastructure, a collection of professional outfits where employees are comparatively well-paid.

SAPO prosecutors, for instance, earn at least $2,500 per month, or six times more than the Ukrainian monthly average. Business is brisk; the agency is currently in the process of hiring eight new prosecutors.

NABU is also searching for a new director, which the EU has said is a key position to fill for Ukraine’s anti-graft efforts.

Even amid the turmoil of war, the agencies are now more productive than in previous years, according to Olena Shcherban, deputy executive director of the Anticorruption Action Centre in Kyiv, a nonprofit think-tank partly funded by Western nations that campaigns for reforms and tracks Ukraine’s progress.

“NABU and SAPO are working more effectively now than in the last couple of years combined,” she said.

Anti-corruption authorities in Kyiv are aware that the West is watching.

Kateryna Butko, a civic activist serving on the SAPO selection committee, acknowledged that Ukraine’s fight against graft is often plodding. She added that foreign donors had a clear incentive to ensure it succeeds by continuing to provide strong policy guidance.

“The work of our anti-corruption institutions is a guarantee that Western money won’t be stolen,” she said.

Ordinary Ukrainians will also be watching, as Kyiv’s recent battlefield victories have buoyed hopes that the country can prevail in the war and successfully rebuild.

An October survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found at least 88% of the country believes Ukraine will be a prosperous EU member within 10 years.

Kyiv resident Kateryna, who was visiting the capital’s Christmas tree with a friend, said that securing a military victory was the top priority for Ukraine.

But the 27-year-old, who didn’t give her surname, said it was also important to establish a fair society to live in, instilled with a clear sense that no-one was above the law.

“We don’t have that kind of understanding here yet.”

Ukraine’s Protection Forces have repelled attacks by Russian invaders near 19 settlements in these kinds of locations as Sumy, Kharkiv, Donetsk and Luhansk about the previous working day.

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Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

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• The Daily Beast has obtained a 37-page staffers’ guide for Kyrsten Sinema. 
• Staffers were instructed to ensure Sinema has groceries every week, per the Daily Beast.
• They also need to make sure Sinema gets a weekly massage, and that she has a “room temperature” bottle of water available at all times.

Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema put in place a long list of requirements for her aides, according to a 37-page staffers’ guide obtained by the Daily Beast which was published on Thursday.

According to the guide, Sinema has issued strict instructions about her schedule — for one, her assistant must ask her in Washington at the beginning of the work week “if she needs groceries.” The assistant must then contact Sinema’s chief of staff to “make sure this is accomplished,” the Daily Beast reported.

Other instructions include making sure Sinema gets a weekly, one-hour massage, and that she has a “room temperature” bottle of water available at all times. The Daily Beast also reported that the guide directs staff to “call Verizon to schedule a repair” if the internet service in the senator’s apartment goes out. 

Insider could not independently verify the contents of the guide. 

The document obtained by the Daily Beast also includes tidbits about how the senator should not be disturbed outside office hours if possible. 

“Kyrsten works hard, but is protective of her personal time,” the news outlet quoted from the document.

“Do not schedule anything, ever, outside of ‘regular’ work hours without first getting Kyrsten’s permission,” read the document, per the Daily Beast. “She will very, very rarely agree to work outside the regular hours, so only ask if it’s a big deal.”

The Daily Beast reported that it had seen the document in its entirety and caveated that it could be a few years old. The outlet said it had independently corroborated the document’s veracity. 

“The alleged information — sourced from anonymous quotes and a purported document I can’t verify — is not in line with official guidance from Sen. Sinema’s office and does not represent official policies of Sen. Sinema’s office,” Hannah Hurley, a spokesperson for Sinema, told the Daily Beast. 

Hurley said as well that Sinema “does not require staff to perform personal errands.”

Hurley did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider. 

Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy testifies before Congress in 2019

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• The House January 6 committee found evidence that top military officials had “genuine concerns” about Trump using the military to overturn the election.
• Trump’s Secretary of the Army didn’t dismiss that top Pentagon officials were concerned.
• The revelation adds further context to why top officials were so outspoken about clarifying the military’s role. 

The House January 6 committee said it found evidence that civilian and military officials who worked under Donald Trump harbored “genuine concerns” that the sitting president would use the military to change the 2020 election results, confirming reports that there were real fears of an American coup.

“Our investigation suggests that those civilian and military officials who had considerable experience working directly with President Trump had genuine concerns about whether he would attempt to use the military to change the election results,” the committee writes in an appendix to its final report that was released Thursday evening. “Again, at this time, there is no evidence the Department of Defense understood exactly what President Trump and his associates planned for January 6th.”

When the panel asked Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy directly about this, Trump’s appointed pick to lead the Army did not call the concerns farfetched.

“There was a lot of talk in the lead-up about martial law . . . and the employment of forces, and you know, that was something that we were all, you know, conscious of,” McCarthy told the committee.

The panel’s stunning conclusion illustrates why top current and former Pentagon officials went to great lengths to make sure the American people knew the military would not get involved.

“We have established a very long 240-year tradition of an apolitical military that does not get involved in domestic politics,” Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told NPR in October 2020.

According to “I Alone Can Fix It,” Milley was far blunter in private. The nation’s highest-ranking officer was telling lawmakers and colleagues that any Trump-led attempted coups would go nowhere. Milley also compared Trump to Hitler.

“They may try, but they’re not going to f**king succeed,” Milley told his deputies, according to the book. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.”

Coup fears had a real cost, the committee concluded. Top commanders were so worried about the optics of troops near the Capitol that they responded to DC Mayor Muriel Bowser’s request for National Guard troops to help with traffic and control on January 6, 2021, with skepticism.

Ultimately, officials reviewed the guard’s deployment by metro stop, nixing any suggestion that troops be stationed by Capitol South, one of the two nearest DC Metro stops to the US Capitol.

When the riot broke out, this meant that guard troops were further away from the Capitol complex. 

This is a breaking news story. Stay with Insider for more updates.

Sidney Powell, attorney for President Donald Trump, conducts a news conference at the Republican National Committee on lawsuits regarding the outcome of the 2020 presidential election on Thursday, November 19, 2020. Trump attorney Rudolph Giuliani, left, also attended.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

• Even Donald Trump thought Sidney Powell sounded “crazy,” per the January 6 panel’s Capitol Riot report.
• Hope Hicks, Trump’s former White House communications director, said he muted Powell during a call.
• While muted, Trump mocked Powell, saying: “This does sound crazy, doesn’t it?” 

Even former President Donald Trump thought Sidney Powell — an attorney who attempted to overturn the 2020 vote on his behalf — was spouting voter fraud claims sounded “crazy.”

This was according to the January 6 panel’s executive summary of their investigation into the Capitol riot, which it released on Thursday. In the report, the committee detailed how Trump on November 20, 2020, received a call from Powell, a far-right lawyer. 

The January 6 panel published testimony from Hope Hicks, Trump’s former White House communications director. Hicks told the panel that while Powell was speaking, Trump muted himself. While muted, he laughed at Powell, and told others in the room: “This does sound crazy, doesn’t it?”

The day before her call with Trump, Powell had taken to the stage at a press conference alongside Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, alleging wild conspiracy theories.

According to the committee’s report, Powell repeated to Trump claims that she had trotted out during that press conference. This included the baseless assertion that there was “massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China in the interference with our elections here in the United States.” Additionally, Powell thought the voting technology company Dominion Voting Systems was in league with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez (who has been dead since 2013), and that this had something to do with the election. 

Two days later, on November 22, 2020, Trump’s team purged Powell from their ranks.

“Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity,” wrote Trump lawyers Giuliani and Jenna Ellis on November 22. 

As for Powell’s fate, in October 2021, the Daily Beast reported that she is now on Trump’s “no-go list.” The Daily Beast spoke to sources who said Powell has been put on a list of people to keep away from Trump, and that the former president will not take her calls. 

In the meantime, Dominion Voting Systems is suing Powell, Giuliani, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell for defamation, alleging that the trio pushed a slew of baseless voter fraud claims that hurt its business. Dominion Voting Systems said in January that it is unlikely to settle the billion-dollar lawsuits given the “devastating harm” the three caused the company. 

Representatives for Powell and a spokesman for Trump did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment. 

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The United States must stop suppressing China’s development and should not continue the “old routine of unilateral bullying”, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to a press statement.

“The U.S. should not challenge China’s red line in a “salami slicing” manner,” Wang also told Blinken in a phone call, according to an official statement from the Chinese foreign ministry on Friday.

WASHINGTON — The House Jan. 6 committee’s final report asserts that Donald Trump criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and failed to act to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol, concluding an extraordinary 18-month investigation into the former president and the violent insurrection two years ago.

The 814-page report released Thursday comes after the panel interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, held 10 hearings and obtained millions of pages of documents. The witnesses — ranging from many of Trump’s closest aides to law enforcement to some of the rioters themselves — detailed Trump’s actions in the weeks ahead of the insurrection and how his wide-ranging pressure campaign to overturn his defeat directly influenced those who brutally pushed past the police and smashed through the windows and doors of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

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The central cause was “one man,” the report says: Trump.

The insurrection gravely threatened democracy and “put the lives of American lawmakers at risk,” the nine-member panel concluded.

In a foreword to the report, outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi says the findings should be a “clarion call to all Americans: to vigilantly guard our Democracy and to give our vote only to those dutiful in their defense of our Constitution.”

The report’s eight chapters of findings tell the story largely as the panel’s hearings did this summer — describing the many facets of the remarkable plan that Trump and his advisers devised to try and void President Joe Biden’s victory. The lawmakers describe his pressure on states, federal officials, lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence to game the system or break the law.

In the two months between the election and the insurrection, the report says, “President Trump or his inner circle engaged in at least 200 apparent acts of public or private outreach, pressure, or condemnation, targeting either State legislators or State or local election administrators, to overturn State election results.”

Trump’s repeated, false claims of widespread voter fraud resonated with his supporters, the committee said, and were amplified on social media, building on the distrust of government he had fostered for his four years in office. And he did little to stop them when they resorted to violence and stormed the Capitol.

The massive, damning report comes as Trump is running again for the presidency and also facing multiple federal investigations, including probes of his role in the insurrection and the presence of classified documents at his Florida estate. This week is particularly fraught for him, as a House committee is expected to release his tax returns after he has fought for years to keep them private. And Trump has been blamed by Republicans for a worse-than-expected showing in the midterm elections, leaving him in his most politically vulnerable state since he won the 2016 election.

Posting on his social media site, Trump called the report “highly partisan” and falsely claimed it didn’t include his statement on Jan. 6 that his supporters should protest “peacefully and patriotically.” The committee noted he followed that comment with election falsehoods and charged language exhorting the crowd to “fight like hell.”

The report details a multitude of failings by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. But it makes an emphatic point that security failures are not what led to the insurrection.

“The President of the United States inciting a mob to march on the Capitol and impede the work of Congress is not a scenario our intelligence and law enforcement communities envisioned for this country,” the committee’s chairman, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, writes in a separate foreword.

The report details Trump’s inaction as his loyalists were violently storming the building. Returning to the White House from his fiery speech, he asked an employee if they had seen his remarks on television.

“Sir, they cut it off because they’re rioting down at the Capitol,” the staffer said, according to the report.

A White House photographer snapped a picture of Trump at 1:21 p.m., learning of the riot from the employee. “By that time, if not sooner, he had been made aware of the violent riot at the Capitol,” the report states.

In total, 187 minutes elapsed between the time Trump finished his speech at the Ellipse and his first effort to get the rioters to disperse, through an eventual video message in which he asked his supporters to go home even as he reassured them, “We love you, you’re very special.”

During those hours, dozens of staffers and associates pleaded with him to make a forceful statement. But he did not.

The committee quotes some of Trump’s most loyal supporters blaming him for the violence.

“We all look like domestic terrorists now,” longtime aide Hope Hicks texted Julie Radford, who served as Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff, in the aftermath.

Hicks also texted a White House lawyer: “I’m so upset. Everything we worked for wiped away.”

The investigation’s release is a final act for House Democrats who are ceding power to Republicans in less than two weeks, and have spent much of their four years in power investigating Trump. Democrats impeached Trump twice, the second time a week after the insurrection. He was acquitted by the Senate both times. Other Democratic-led probes investigated his finances, his businesses, his foreign ties and his family.

On Monday, the panel of seven Democrats and two Republicans officially passed their investigation to the Justice Department, recommending the department investigate the former president on four crimes, including aiding an insurrection. While the criminal referrals have no legal standing, they are a final statement from the committee after its extensive, year-and-a-half-long probe.

Trump has tried to discredit the report, slamming members of the committee as “thugs and scoundrels” as he has continued to falsely dispute his 2020 loss.

In response to the panel’s criminal referrals, Trump said: “These folks don’t get it that when they come after me, people who love freedom rally around me. It strengthens me.”

The committee has also begun to release hundreds of transcripts of its interviews. On Thursday, the panel released transcripts of two closed-door interviews with former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified in person at one of the televised hearings over the summer and described in vivid detail Trump’s efforts to influence the election results and indifference toward the violence as it occurred.

In the two interviews, both conducted after her July appearance at the hearing, she described how many of Trump’s allies, including her lawyer, pressured her not to say too much in her committee interviews.