Arctic cold extended its grip over much of the United States on Friday, combining with snow, ice and howling winds from a major winter storm roaring out of the Great Lakes to disrupt energy supplies and thwart travel for millions of Americans ahead of the holiday weekend.

The extreme winter weather was blamed for at least four deaths on Friday.

A 50-vehicle traffic pileup on the Ohio Turnpike in the midst of a blizzard near Toledo killed one motorist, injured several others and shut down both lanes of the highway, according to the Toledo Fire & Rescue Department.

Stranded motorists had to be evacuated by bus to keep them from freezing in their cars in sub-zero temperatures, the department said.

Three weather-related fatalities were also confirmed in the adjacent state of Kentucky – two from car accidents and one a homeless person who died of exposure.

“Please stay home and stay safe,” Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, he said on Twitter, announcing the deaths.

With the deep freeze stretching from Montana to Texas as it crept eastward, some 240 million people – more than two-thirds of the U.S. population – were under winter weather warnings and advisories on Friday, the National Weather Service (NWS) said.

The nation’s coldest spot on Friday was the remote northern Montana town of Havre, near the Canadian border, where the mercury had risen from a low of 38 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (minus 39 C) to a relatively balmy minus 20 just before noon, the NWS reported.

“It’s been colder, but yeah, I guess it’s cold out,” Tyler Schaub, the manager of Rod’s Drive Inn, acknowledged as he was flipping burgers on the grill. “We’re used to it, but even then it’s best not to stay outside too long.”

Numbing cold intensified by high winds extended through the Deep South to the U.S.-Mexico border, bringing single-digit wind chill factors to the border city of El Paso, Texas. Exposure to such conditions can cause frostbite within minutes.

Hard-freeze warnings were posted in southern Georgia and across much of all four Gulf Coast states – Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida.

Farther north, heavy snowfall was forecast in parts of Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York, including upwards of 35 inches in Buffalo, Weather Service meteorologist Ashton Robinson Cook said.

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

The extreme weather disrupted households and holiday plans just days before Christmas.

With the nation’s energy systems strained by rising demand for heat, as well as by storm-related damage to transmission lines, an estimated 1.5 million U.S. homes and businesses were left without power on Friday, according to tracking site Poweroutage.us.

Heating and energy prices spiked as inclement weather forced energy production cuts and the deep freeze drove demand higher.

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Severe winds, ice and snow also upended commercial air traffic during one of the busiest travel periods of the year.

Nearly 5,000 U.S. flights were canceled Friday, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware. About 500 flights into or out of Seattle’s major airport were axed as a separate storm system brought ice and freezing rain to the Pacific Northwest.

The American Automobile Association (AAA) had estimated that 112.7 million people planned to travel 50 miles (80 km) or more from home between Friday and Jan. 2. That number was likely to drop due to treacherous weather complicating air and road travel going into the weekend.

Buffalo-area officials in New York instituted a driving ban.

“If there’s any good news, it’s that the storm has moved quickly over some areas,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told MSNBC on Friday. Many airports, such as Denver, are expected to bounce back quickly from a wave of delays and cancellations. Other hubs like Chicago could recover later on Friday, he said.

Last-minute holiday gift purchases may also have slim chances of reaching their destinations by Christmas.

FedEx (FDX.N), United Parcel Service (UPS.N), the U.S. Postal Service and Amazon.com (AMZN.O) all alerted customers that severe weather was disrupting key operations in Tennessee, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, the Dakotas and other areas hard-hit by bitter cold and blizzards. read more

Weather forecasters said the massive storm over the Midwest had materialized into a “bomb cyclone” – a phenomenon caused by a drastic, rapid drop in atmospheric pressure that forms a kind of cold-weather hurricane.

The storm system was expected to produce blinding snow from the northern Plains and Great Lakes region to the upper Mississippi Valley and western New York state.

Along the Eastern seaboard, rain and wind-driven surges of ocean surf pushed inland could cause up to 3 feet of coastal flooding, with flash freezing and black ice possible, the Weather Service said.

Forecasters predict some relief over the next days from the deep freeze. Across the northern Rockies and High Plains, temperatures could rebound by 40 to 60 degrees over the weekend.

For now, meteorologist Cook said: “Bundle up and stay indoors if you can, and check on your neighbors.”

(This story has been refiled to add dropped word ‘from’ in paragraph 4)

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Video from an interview with Ivanka Trump, former President Donald Trump’s daughter and advisor, is played during a hearing by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol in the Cannon House Office Building on June 13, 2022 in Washington, DC.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

• The January 6 committee released a new trove of nearly 50 witness transcripts on Friday.
• The document dump comes one day after the panel published its final report on the Capitol attack.
• Testimony from Ivanka Trump, Mike Pompeo, and Bill Bar was included in the release. 

The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot released a new trove of witness deposition transcripts on Friday evening, even as most lawmakers had already departed Washington, DC, ahead of the holiday weekend.

The document dump comes one day after the nine-member panel published its final report detailing the deadly Capitol riot and former President Donald Trump’s role in it.

Testimony from several high-profile witnesses were included in the Friday release, including Ivanka Trump, former Attorney General Bill Bar, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. 

The committee released testimony transcripts from 46 witnesses in total on Friday, having already published several transcripts earlier in the week. Testimony from Trump-aligned attorney Sidney Powell, former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, and former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany was also released Friday.

The release of the full report comes in just under the wire as the 117th Congress wraps up. But the timing of the document dumps has led to little fanfare given the proximity of the holiday weekend.

The Friday publications come four days after the panel held its final public hearing on Monday, during which they referred Trump to the Justice Department on four criminal charges, including obstruction and inciting an insurrection.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, the panel’s chairman, said earlier this week that the committee will continue to release non-sensitive witness interviews through the end of the year before the panel dissolves ahead of the new Congress.

This story is breaking. Please check back for updates. 

Thiago Prudencio/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

• A DoorDash delivery driver had her car stolen with her infant twins inside.
• DoorDash allows children to be in the car while deliveries are made. 
• Gig workers often bring their children on jobs because childcare costs are prohibitive. 

A DoorDash delivery worker had her car stolen with her twin babies inside earlier this week in Ohio. The children were eventually found, but the frightening incident highlighted a reality for many gig workers — their kids come with them on deliveries.

The flexibility of delivery work for companies like DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Instacart can be appealing to parents. But the unpredictable income from gig work can make paying for childcare while out on deliveries uneconomical.

“Most independent workers who are doing this work are at the low end of the pay spectrum, which makes childcare so expensive,” Lindsey Cameron, a professor of management at Wharton business school who studies the gig economy, told Insider. She noted that gig workers often bring their children on jobs because childcare costs are prohibitive. 

DoorDash says drivers earn about $25 an hour. The rate can fluctuate based on demand and does not include gas or wear on drivers’ cars. Meanwhile, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average childcare worker makes about $13 an hour. 

It is not uncommon for delivery drivers to bring children along for deliveries, and it is allowed under DoorDash’s guidelines. 

On Reddit forums discussing the practice, most drivers have neutral or positive experiences while delivering with their children. Some drivers note the quality time they spend with their children and how they enjoy teaching their children about work. Others note that their typical hourly rate wouldn’t cover childcare costs. 

A DoorDash spokesperson told Insider: “Some working parents choose to dash with their children because it is a flexible, convenient way to earn supplemental income.” DoorDash allows minors on delivery rides, but the company’s insurance only covers Dashers on deliveries. The spokesperson noted: “if you are picking an order up from a merchant or delivering an order to a customer, you must have a Dasher account. This means kids are not allowed to pick up or drop off orders.” 

Uber doesn’t allow drivers to bring along other passengers while they’re transporting customers or making deliveries for Uber Eats, according to their community guidelines. An Instacart spokesperson said, “Shoppers may not bring anyone along (including minors) who does not have an Instacart Shopper account while providing services on the platform.” Instacart noted that it offers shoppers discounted backup care through Care.com. 

The practice of bringing a child along for a delivery rarely makes headlines unless the unthinkable happens. 

Last year, a DoorDash delivery driver in Georgia had her car stolen with her 1-year-old daughter inside. The baby was found on the porch of a nearby home. In San Francisco, a DoorDash driver’s car was also stolen with his children inside last year. His children were found safe, but the delivery worker, Jeffrey Fang, was criticized for having his kids in the car. 

“I will take ownership of the fact that I had kids with me, and that’s a risk, but I’m not doing it out of willingness. It is more of lack of choice — some might say desperation — and in some ways, it was,” Fang, CNN Business, at the time. 

Incidents like these highlight that the gig economy has created a “whole new class of workers who are in precarious situations,” said Cameron. 

But there could be ways to minimize the risk for delivery drivers and their children, should they need to bring them along, she said. For example, she said, as these companies give drivers more control over deliveries they accept, they could allow drivers to accept only orders where customers come to the car to pick up orders. A small step like that would certainly be easier than overhauling America’s expensive childcare system, she said. 

 

I’m not sure how many people on the outside understand this, but incoming House Republican George Santos is a gift to the Democrats. Even if they can’t get him to resign, they’ll spend the next two years chipping away at House Republicans in vulnerable districts over their refusal to condemn or expel him. The Santos scandal could net the Democrats 3-5 seats in 2024.

Democrats have no control over whether Santos resigns. They don’t have a two thirds vote to expel him. All they can do is pressure him. It’s solely up to him if he wants to resign and disappear before more gets dug up. But it may be better for Democrats if he stays anyway.

If Santos quits, it’ll make the House Republican majority that much smaller, and with some special elections and some luck it could put the majority on the line at some point. But if he stays, Democrats get to keep using him as a weapon, and it’ll increase their odds of winning the House majority in 2024.

This is how things actually work in politics, and it’s how you have to look at things if your goal is to win. It’s not about “shouldn’t be allowed” or “needs to be held accountable.” Those concepts have their place. But they don’t apply to winning in politics.

Nor is there any point wasting one minute of your time focusing on why the Democrats didn’t uncover this before the election. Who cares? This kind of lamenting is not relevant to winning. Waste of time. And he hid it well enough that even the media didn’t find it until just now.

House Democratic leadership is doing a really good job of pushing Santos to the front and making him a real problem for House Republicans in swing districts who are refusing to denounce or expel him. If you care about winning, join the Democrats in pushing this messaging.

How much have you pushed Santos out front this week? How many times have you retweeted House Democrats’ tweets about Santos this week? That’s the measure of whether you’re doing your part as an activist. Yes, you! No matter how savvy House Democrats are with their messaging, they need activists like you to help repeat and amplify it whenever you agree with it. So check out what leading Democrats are saying on social media right now about the George Santos scandal, and let’s help them spread it.

The post George Santos is becoming a huge gift to House Democrats appeared first on Palmer Report.

(JTA) – Panettone, the fluffy, fruit-speckled archetypal Christmas cake, is this holiday season’s “it” dessert — and the creator of perhaps the most coveted version in the United States is an Israeli-American Jew.

The New York Times this week credited baker Roy Shvartzapel with spearheading “the American panettone revolution” through his business From Roy.

Shvartzapel has dedicated the bulk of his career to the airy Italian cakes, training under Iginio Massari, the undisputed master baker in Italy, and obsessing over each ingredient and step in the 40-hour production cycle. After a flurry of coverage in his company’s early days in 2016, and especially since being endorsed by Oprah Winfrey in 2018, Shvartzapel’s business has grown dramatically. Last year, he said he expected to sell nearly 300,000, at $75 a piece, both in stores and via mail order. This year, the price is $85, and preorders sold out by  — without, Shvartzapel said on a podcast last year, any spending on marketing.

While Shvartzapel’s goal of turning panettone into a year-round treat means he has several non-traditional flavors in his repertoire, From Roy only offers a few at a time — and the company plans to keep it that way.

“There’s lots of pastry items that I love that I will never be making for my business,” Shvartzapel said on the podcast, with the chef Chris Cosentino. “I’m a big believer that less is more, generally speaking, in most things.”

Shvartzapel declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency this month, explaining through a publicist that he was too busy before Christmas to speak. But in public comments and social media posts made before this year’s panettone “gold rush,” as the New York Times put it, he has offered details about the intersection of his Jewish identity and his Christmas baking.

Born in Karmiel, Israel, where a statue modeled on his mother holding him as an infant stands in a park, Shvartzapel was raised in Houston and now lives in California’s Bay Area with his children and Israeli-born wife, who also helped launch From Roy. A devoted athlete as a teenager, he played collegiate basketball and spent time on Karmiel’s Maccabi team but realized he would never make the NBA.

“Like every good Jewish boy,” Shvartzapel told David Chang, the Momofuku chef, on a 2019 podcast interview, he considered becoming a lawyer before realizing that cooking played to his passions and strengths.

After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 2004, Shvartzapel began looking for work in New York City. It was a cookbook by the Jewish baker Dorie Greenspan that indirectly led to his first job: He spotted a lemon tart in a new cafe that looked like one she had photographed by the master French chef Pierre Hermé, then talked his way into a job working there, at Bouley Bakery, under Hermé’s former executive chef. Ultimately, that led to him working in Paris, where he had the panettone that changed his life.

“The texture, the aroma, the chew,” he said in 2018. ”I tasted it and it was like one of those meditative lights-off moments. The crazy love affair began.”

Shvartzapel has spoken extensively about his intense work ethic, his struggles with depression and, of course, what sets his panettone apart from low-cost supermarket varieties. He has said less publicly about himself as a Jew. But last year, on Facebook, he wished his friends a happy Passover with a picture of a cheesy omelet and a side of chopped liver — both prepared with attention to the holiday’s prohibitions on leavened bread (such as panettone) but, together, not a kosher meal.

“Modern jew … I mean, gotta combine the dairy and the meat to make it particularly kosher for Passover,” he wrote, adding laughing emojis.

Although panettone is often mentioned in the same breath as its Jewish enriched-dough cousin, babka, its history is rooted in the Catholic Church. Legend has it that it was created by accident on a 15th-century Christmas Eve, and was served to Catholic students and even the pope by the 1500s, according to records from the time.

Still, it makes sense that America’s most prominent panettone maker is Jewish, according to Debbie Prinz, a food historian and author of the forthcoming book “On The Bread Trail,” which grew out of her exploration of Jewish celebration cakes.

“It’s not surprising that there’s this interchange, especially today, since the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews are even fewer than they used to be,” Prinz said.

But while Shvartzapel’s panettone path may be modern, historic patterns of cultural collision have often cut the other way, sending traditionally Jewish foods onto the Christmas table.

One notable example appears to be lebkuchen, a fruit-studded spice cookie popular in Germany. While the origins of the treat are not clear, one theory is that lebkuchen entered German cuisine through lekach, a honey cake eaten by Italian Jewish traders passing through during the Middle Ages, according to researchers at the Leo Baeck Institute, a German Jewish institution. (German Jews fleeing the Nazis imported contemporary lebkuchen recipes and, in several cases, became successful lebkuchen purveyors in New York.)

Meanwhile, in panettone’s home country of Italy, traditional Christmas menus include a host of dishes that are likely to have originated in Jewish kitchens: pezzetti fritti or mixed fried vegetables; bigoli, or buckwheat noodles, with onion and anchovies; spongata, a cake imported from Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition; and nociata, or nut bars.

Many of those foods were historically Jewish because they made use of ingredients such as eggplant that were considered distasteful by non-Jewish Italians, or of ingredients such as anchovies that Jews used because they were not permitted to access higher-quality fish.

“There are a number of recipes that we call Jewish that came out of the fact that the Italians were really nasty to Jews,” said Benedetta Jasmine Guetta, author of “Cooking all Guidia: A Celebration of the Jewish Food of Italy.”

“Most of the time, actually I’m going to say 100% of the time, people don’t know” that the dishes were originally Jewish, Guetta added. “This is a common problem and the reason why I wrote my book.”

But while Guetta’s focus is on the Jewish foods of Italy, in December, she often turns to that famous domed Christmas cake.

“I have definitely grown up eating a great deal of panettone. My parents checked the ingredients to make sure it didn’t contain pork fat,” she said. “It’s a yummy seasonal treat.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Panettone, the Christmas cake, is having a moment — and a Jewish chef has carved off a big slice appeared first on The Forward.

Airlines canceled over 5,000 U.S. flights on Friday as massive winter storms snarled airport operations around the United States and frustrated tens of thousands of holiday travelers.

The cancellations followed nearly 2,700 canceled flights on Thursday and almost 500 flights have already been canceled for Saturday, according to flight tracking website FlightAware.

Passenger railroad Amtrak has canceled dozens of trains through Christmas, disrupting holiday travel for thousands.

Many highways in the Midwest faced lengthy delays because of snowy weather or crashes and police in Indiana areas urged motorists to avoid nonessential travel in the northwest part of the state.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposed ground stops or delays for de-icing at a number of U.S. airports because of winter weather.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told CNN the U.S. aviation system “is operating under enormous strain” and two different storms and high winds are affecting airports around the country. About 10% of U.S. flights were canceled on Thursday, Buttigieg said.

Another 8,000 U.S. flights were delayed on Friday – including more than 32% of those operated by American Airlines (AAL.O), United Airlines (UAL.O), Delta Air Lines (DAL.N) and Southwest Airlines (LUV.N).

Southwest canceled 951 flights on Friday, nearly a quarter of all its scheduled flights, while Alaska Airlines (ALK.N) canceled 445, or 57%, of its flights.

Seattle-Tacoma International Airport had 303 flights, or 54% of departures canceled as of 2:30 p.m. PST. The FAA early on Friday issued a ground stop there due to snow and ice.

More than 40% of departing flights at Detroit Metro were canceled, 67% at Portland, 36% at New York’s LaGuardia, 27% at Boston and 25% at Chicago O’Hare.

Chicago was facing dangerously cold temperatures with the National Weather Service warning wind chill could hit minus 30 Fahrenheits (minus 34 Celsius)

The U.S. awarded defense contracts to companies on Friday, including one of over a billion dollars to Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N), the Department of Defense said in a statement.

“This contract procures long lead time materials, parts, components, and efforts necessary to maintain on-time production and delivery of 118 Lot 18 aircraft F-35 aircraft for the Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy, non-U.S Department of Defense participants, and Foreign Military Sales customers,” the department said on the $1.05 billion Lockheed contract.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin attends the plenary session of the Commonwealth of the Independent States (CIS) Summit, October 14, 2022.

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• A Russian lawmaker is calling for legal action against Putin for calling the Ukraine invasion a “war.”
• Putin signed a law in March that effectively made it illegal to call the invasion a war.
• Until Thursday, Putin had publicly referred to the war only as a “special military operation.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly described the conflict in Ukraine as a “war” for the first time on Thursday, previously only referring to the unprovoked invasion he launched in late February as a “special military operation.” A Russian lawmaker is now calling for Putin to face legal action over the comment and wants prosecutors to investigate, contending the remark violates a law the Russian leader himself signed earlier this year. 

“Our goal is not to spin this flywheel of a military conflict, but, on the contrary, to end this war,” Putin said during a press conference Thursday. “This is what we are striving for.”

Nikita Yuferev, a lawmaker in Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg, said that this comment is not consistent with a law Putin signed that effectively criminalized referring to Russia’s assault on Ukraine as a “war” or “invasion.” The law made it illegal to spread “false information” about the Russian military, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, which essentially made criticism of the war a criminal offense.

“Vladimir Putin called the war a war but there was no decree to end the special military operation and no war was declared,” Yuferev said on social media, per the Moscow Times, adding, “I sent an appeal to the authorities so Putin can see justice for spreading ‘fake news’ about the army.”

Critics of Putin have often ended up behind bars or died in violent ways. Putin’s most prominent critic, Alexei Navalny, nearly died in 2020 after he was poisoned with the Soviet era nerve agent Novichok in Siberia. After receiving treatment in Germany, Navalny returned to Moscow in early 2021 and was promptly arrested and sentenced to prison on charges widely decried as politically motivated. Navalny remains behind bars, where he continues to criticize Putin and Russia’s war in Ukraine. 

Earlier this month, a Moscow court sentenced opposition politician Ilya Yashin to eight and a half years in prison for spreading “false information” about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Yashin, an ally of Navalny and vocal critic of the war, had spoken about atrocities committed against Ukrainian civilians in Bucha, a Kyiv suburb, on his YouTube channel.

Yevgeny Roizman, a former mayor of the Russian city of Ekaterinburg, in August was detained on charges of “discrediting” the Russian military. Roizman told reporters he was detained after referring to Russia’s war in Ukraine as an “invasion.”

Indeed, Putin has gone to extraordinary lengths to censor criticism of the Russian government and the war in Ukraine. 

Despite the risks of publicly opposing the Russian leader and the ongoing invasion, Yuferev told Reuters it was important for him to draw attention to the contradiction and the injustice of these laws that [Putin] adopts and signs but which he himself doesn’t observe.”

“I think the more we talk about this, the more people will doubt his honesty, his infallibility, and the less support he will have,” Yuferev added.

Putin and other top Russian officials avoided calling the Ukraine conflict a “war,” instead employing the phrase “special operation,” in an apparent effort to diminish the scale of the invasion to the Russian public. In reality, Russia’s offensive in Ukraine is the largest military conflict in Europe since World War II.