TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — China’s military sent 71 planes and seven ships toward Taiwan in a 24-hour display of force directed at the island, Taiwan’s defense ministry said Monday, after China expressed anger at Taiwan-related provisions i n a U.S. annual defense spending bill passed on Saturday.

China’s military harassment of self-ruled Taiwan, which it claims is its own territory, has intensified in recent years, and the Communist Party’s People’s Liberation Army has sent planes or ships toward the island on a near-daily basis.

Between 6 a.m. Sunday and 6 a.m. Monday, 47 of the Chinese planes crossed the median of the Taiwan Strait, an unofficial boundary once tacitly accepted by both sides, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense.

Among the planes China sent towards Taiwan were 18 J-16 fighter jets, 11 J-1 fighters, 6 Su-30 fighters and drones.

Taiwan said it monitored the Chinese moves through its land-based missile systems, as well as on its own navy vessels.

“This is a firm response to the current US-Taiwan escalation and provocation,” said Shi Yi, the spokesman for the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command, in a statement on Sunday night. It announced that the PLA was holding joint combat patrols and joint strike drills in the waters around Taiwan.

Shi was referring to the U.S. defense spending bill, which calls China a strategic challenge. With regard to the Indo-Pacific region, the legislation authorizes increased security cooperation with Taiwan and requires expanded cooperation with India on emerging defense technologies, readiness and logistics.

China’s military has often used large military exercises as a demonstration of force in response to U.S. government actions in support of Taiwan. It conducted large live-fire military exercises in August in response to U.S. House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. Beijing views visits from foreign governments to the island as de facto recognition of the island as independent and a challenge to China’s claim of sovereignty.

A lethal blizzard paralyzed Buffalo, New York, on Christmas Day, trapping motorists and rescue workers in their vehicles, leaving thousands of homes without power and raising the death toll from storms that have chilled much of the United States for days.

At least 30 people have died in U.S. weather-related incidents, according to an NBC News tally, since a deep freeze gripped most of the nation, coupled with snow, ice and howling winds from a sprawling storm that roared out of the Great Lakes region on Friday.

CNN has reported a total of 26 weather fatalities.

Much of the loss of life has centered in and around Buffalo at the edge of Lake Erie in western New York, as numbing cold and heavy “lake-effect” snow – the result of frigid air moving over warmer lake waters – persisted through the holiday weekend.

Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said the storm’s confirmed death toll climbed to 13 on Sunday, up from three reported overnight in the Buffalo region. The latest victims included some found in cars and some in snow banks, Poloncarz said, adding that the death tally would likely rise further.

“This is not the Christmas any of us hoped for nor expected,” Poloncarz said on Twitter on Sunday. “My deepest condolences to the families who have lost loved ones.”

New York Governor Kathy Hochul called it an “epic, once-in-a-lifetime” weather disaster that ranked as the fiercest winter storm to hit the greater Buffalo area since a crippling 1977 blizzard that killed nearly 30 people.

“We have now surpassed the scale of that storm, in its intensity, the longevity, the ferocity of its winds,” Hochul told an evening news conference, adding that the current storm would likely to go down in history as “the blizzard of ’22.”

The latest blizzard came nearly six weeks after a record-setting but shorter-lived lake-effect storm struck western New York.

Despite a ban on road travel imposed since Friday, hundreds of Erie County motorists were stranded in their vehicles over the weekend, with National Guard troops called in to help with rescues hindered by white-out conditions and drifting snow, Poloncarz said.

Many snow plows and other equipment sent on Saturday and Sunday became stuck in the snow, “and we had to send rescue missions to rescue the rescuers,” he told reporters.

The Buffalo police department posted an online plea to the public for assistance in search-and-recovery efforts, asking those who “have a snow mobile and are willing to help” to call a hotline for instructions.

The severity of the storm was notable even for a region accustomed to harsh winter weather.

Christina Klaffka, 39, a North Buffalo resident, watched the shingles blow off her neighbor’s home and listened to her windows rattle from “hurricane-like winds.” She lost power along with her whole neighborhood on Saturday evening, and was still without electricity on Sunday morning.

“My TV kept flickering while I was trying to watch the Buffalo Bills and Chicago Bears game. I lost power shortly after the 3rd quarter,” she said.

John Burns, 58, a retiree in North Buffalo, said he and his family were trapped in their house for 36 hours by the storm and extreme cold that he called “mean and nasty.”

“Nobody was out. Nobody was even walking their dogs,” he said. “Nothing was going on for two days.”

Snowfall totals were hard to gauge, he added, because of fierce winds that reduced accumulation between houses, but piled up a 5-foot (1.5-meter) drift “in front of my garage.”

Hochul told reporters on Sunday that the Biden administration had agreed to support her request for a federal disaster declaration.

About 200 National Guard troops were mobilized in western New York to help police and fire crews, conduct wellness checks and bring supplies to shelters, Hochul said.

The larger storm system was moving east on Sunday, after knocking out power to as many as 1.5 million customers at the height of outages late last week and forcing thousands of commercial flight cancellations during the busy holiday travel period.

More than 150,000 U.S. homes and businesses were without power on Sunday, down sharply from the 1.8 million without power as of early Saturday, according to PowerOutage.us. In Buffalo, 15,000 residents were still without electricity on Sunday evening, Poloncarz said.

He said one electrical substation knocked offline was sealed off by an 18-foot-tall mound of snow, and utility crews found the entire facility frozen inside.

Christmas Day temperatures, while beginning to rebound from near-zero readings that were widespread on Saturday, remained well below average across the central and eastern United States, and below freezing even as far south as the Gulf Coast, National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologist Rich Otto said.

Nearly 4 feet of snow was measured at Buffalo airport by Sunday, according to the latest NWS tally, with white-out conditions lingering south of Buffalo into the afternoon as continuing squalls dumped 2-3 inches of snow an hour.

In Kentucky, officials confirmed three storm-related deaths since Friday, while at least four people were dead and several injured in auto-related accidents in Ohio, where a 50-vehicle pileup shut down the Ohio Turnpike during a blizzard on Friday.

Other deaths related to extreme cold or weather-induced vehicle accidents were reported in Missouri, Tennessee, Kansas and Colorado, according to news reports.

Related Galleries:

Mask-wearing Beijing and Shanghai commuters crowded subway trains on Monday, with China’s two biggest cities moving closer to living with COVID-19, as millions have been infected with the virus across the country.

After years of ruthless anti-coronavirus curbs, President Xi Jinping scrapped the country’s zero-COVID policy in the face of protests and a widening outbreak.

But after the initial shock of the policy U-turn, and a few weeks in which people in Beijing and Shanghai stayed indoors, either dealing with the disease or trying to avoid it, there are signs that life is on course to returning closer to normal.

Subway trains in Beijing and Shanghai were packed, while some major traffic arteries in the two cities jammed with slow-moving cars on Monday as residents commuted to work.

An annual Christmas market held at the Bund, a commercial area in Shanghai, was also crowded over the weekend. Crowds thronged the winter festive season at Shanghai Disneyland and Beijing’s Universal Studios on Sunday, queuing up for rides in Christmas-themed outfits.

The number of trips to scenic spots in the southern city of Guangzhou this weekend increased by 132% from last weekend, local newspaper The 21st Century Business Herald reported.

China is the last major country to move toward treating COVID as endemic. Its containment measures had slowed the $17-trillion economy to its lowest growth rate in nearly half a century, disrupting global supply chains and trade.

The economy is expected to suffer further in the short-term, as the COVID wave spreads toward manufacturing areas and workforces fall ill, before bouncing back next year, analysts say.

Tesla suspended production at its Shanghai plant on Saturday, bringing ahead a plan to pause most work at the plant in the last week of December. The company did not give a reason.

Despite a record surge of cases nationwide, China reported no COVID deaths on the mainland for the six days through Sunday, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said on Sunday, even as crematories faced surging demand.

China has narrowed its definition for classifying deaths as COVID-related, counting only those involving COVID-caused pneumonia or respiratory failure, raising eyebrows among world health experts.

The country’s health care system has been under enormous strain, with staff being asked to work while sick and retired medical workers in rural communities being rehired to help, according to state media.

The provincial government of Zhejiang, a big industrial province near Shanghai with a population of 65.4 million, said on Sunday it was battling about a million new daily COVID-19 infections, a number expected to double in the days ahead.

Health authorities in the southeastern Jiangxi province have said infections would hit an apex in early January, adding that there could be other peaks as people travel next month for Lunar New Year celebrations, state media reported.

They warned that the wave of infections would last three months and that about 80% of the province’s 45 million residents could get infected.

The city of Qingdao, in the eastern Shandong province, has estimated that up to 530,000 residents were being infected each day.

Cities across China have been racing to add intensive-care units and fever clinics, facilities designed to prevent the wider spread of contagious disease in hospitals.

The Beijing municipal government has said the number of fever clinics in the city had increased from 94 to almost 1,300, state media said. Shanghai has 2,600 such clinics and has transferred doctors from less-strained medical departments to help out.

Worries remain about the ability of less-affluent cities in China to cope with a surge in severe infections, especially as hundreds of millions of rural migrant workers are expected to return to their families for Lunar New Year.

Related Galleries:

Russians troops are working “round-the-clock” at new anti-aircraft missile system positions to defend against missile and air strikes by Ukraine, the Russian Interfax reported late on Sunday citing the defence ministry.

Crews of the S-300V systems were “mastering new position areas” of the Russian long range surface-to-air missile systems, the news agency reported, citing a ministry statement.

“The air defence units of the Western Military District continue to serve in the new position areas on combat duty around the clock,” the agency cited the ministry as saying.

The Western Military District, one of Russia’s five military districts, incorporates regions bordering Ukraine, including the Belgorod and Bryansk regions. It also covers the Kaliningrad exclave.

Citing a military commander, Interfax reported that the S-300V battery is capable of tracking a target at a distance of up to 204 km (127 miles) and at an altitude of up to 30 km (18.6 miles).

An incident at the Engels air base in Russia’s Saratov region was being investigated but there was no damage to civilian infrastructure, a local governor said, after media reports of blasts at the base earlier on Monday.

Ukrainian and Russian media outlets reported that blasts were heard after midnight at the Engels air base, hundreds of kilometres (miles) from the frontlines in Ukraine.

“There were no emergencies in residential areas of the (Engels) city,” Roman Busargin, the governor of the region, said on the Telegram messaging app.

“There is absolutely no threat to residents … Civil infrastructure facilities were not damaged. Information about the incident at a military facility is being checked by law enforcement agencies.

The RBC-Ukraine news agency reported that two explosions took place. The Russian news outlet Baza reported, citing local residents, that air raid sirens were wailing and an explosion was heard.

The air base, near the city of Saratov, about 730 km (450 miles) southeast of Moscow, was hit on Dec. 5 in what Russia said was Ukrainian drone attacks on two Russian air bases that day.

The twin strikes dealt Moscow a major reputational blow and raised questions about why its defences failed, analysts said, as attention turned to the use of drones in the war between neighbours.

Ukraine has never publicly claimed responsibility for attacks inside Russia, but has said, however, that such incidents are “karma” for Russia’s invasion.

TAIPEI (Reuters) -Forty-three Chinese air force planes crossed the Taiwan Strait’s median line in the past 24 hours, Taiwan’s Defence Ministry said on Monday, as Beijing continues its military activities close to the Chinese-claimed island.

China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory, said it had conducted “strike drills” in the sea and airspace around Taiwan on Sunday in response to what it said was provocation from the democratically-governed island and the United States.

Taiwan, which strongly rejects China’s sovereignty claims, said the drills showed Beijing was destroying regional peace and trying to cow Taiwan’s people.

The jets involved in the latest incursion briefly crossed the median line of the sensitive Taiwan Strait, an unofficial buffer, according to a map provided by Taiwan’s defence ministry. Seven Chinese navy ships were also detected near Taiwan, the ministry said.

Taiwan sent unspecified combat aircraft to warn away the Chinese planes, while missile systems monitored their flight, the ministry said, using standard wording for its response.

China has stepped up pressure in recent years on the self-governed island to accept Beijing’s rule. Taiwan’s government says it wants peace but will defend itself if attacked.

Kari Lake (or “Misty,” as Palmer Report readers lovingly named her) has lost her lawsuit! That’s right. The news is breaking as I write this. But — it’s over. Misty’s last song has sputtered to a close. “IT IS ORDERED: CONFIRMING THE ELECTION OF KATIE HOBBS AS ARIZONA GOVERNOR-ELECT.”

The Judge also invited a “statement of cost” to be filed. And a motion for sanctions. And what a lovely time for this to have come — the afternoon of Christmas Eve. Her case has been dismissed — Happy holidays, everyone! Misty is certainly not happy and has already declared she will be appealing.

You know what, dear readers? I hope she does. I hope she appeals and appeals and loses and loses like the spoiled brat and election denier she is. Chaos has erupted on the internet, mostly from well-wishers congratulating Katie Hobbs and thanking the judge. But amidst the festivities, there are a few tears of anguish — from Maga:

“Recall the Judge!”

Maga says.

“Corrupt Judge”

Maga says.

“Shut up, Maga” we say. Congratulations to Maricopa county, Governor-Elect Hobbs, and democracy. Happy holidays Misty.

The post Kari Lake’s endgame collapses appeared first on Palmer Report.

A lethal blizzard paralyzed Buffalo, New York, on Christmas Day, trapping motorists and rescue workers in their vehicles, leaving thousands of homes without power and raising the death toll from storms that have chilled much of the United States for days.

At least 30 people have died in U.S. weather-related incidents, according to an NBC News tally, since a deep freeze gripped most of the nation, coupled with snow, ice and howling winds from a sprawling storm that roared out of the Great Lakes region on Friday.

CNN has reported a total of 26 weather fatalities.

Much of the loss of life has centered in and around Buffalo at the edge of Lake Erie in western New York, as numbing cold and heavy “lake-effect” snow – the result of frigid air moving over warmer lake waters – persisted through the holiday weekend.

Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said the storm’s confirmed death toll climbed to 12 on Sunday, up from three reported overnight in the Buffalo region. The latest victims included some found in cars and some in snow banks, Poloncarz said, adding that the death tally might rise further.

“This is not the Christmas any of us hoped for nor expected,” Poloncarz said on Twitter on Sunday. “My deepest condolences to the families who have lost loved ones.”

New York Governor Kathy Hochul called it an “epic, once-in-a-lifetime” weather disaster that ranked as the fiercest winter storm to hit the greater Buffalo area since a crippling 1977 blizzard that killed nearly 30 people.

“We have now surpassed the scale of that storm, in its intensity, the longevity, the ferocity of its winds,” Hochul told an evening news conference, adding that the current storm would likely to go down in history as “the blizzard of ’22.”

The latest blizzard came nearly six weeks after a record-setting but shorter-lived lake-effect storm struck western New York.

Despite a ban on road travel imposed since Friday, hundreds of Erie County motorists were stranded in their vehicles over the weekend, with National Guard troops called in to help with rescues hindered by white-out conditions and drifting snow, Poloncarz said.

Many snow plows and other equipment sent on Saturday and Sunday became stuck in the snow, “and we had to send rescue missions to rescue the rescuers,” he told reporters.

The Buffalo police department posted an online plea to the public for assistance in search-and-recovery efforts, asking those who “have a snow mobile and are willing to help” to call a hotline for instructions.

The severity of the storm was notable even for a region accustomed to harsh winter weather.

Christina Klaffka, 39, a North Buffalo resident, watched the shingles blow off her neighbor’s home and listened to her windows rattle from “hurricane-like winds.” She lost power along with her whole neighborhood on Saturday evening, and was still without electricity on Sunday morning.

“My TV kept flickering while I was trying to watch the Buffalo Bills and Chicago Bears game. I lost power shortly after the 3rd quarter,” she said.

John Burns, 58, a retiree in North Buffalo, said he and his family were trapped in their house for 36 hours by the storm and extreme cold that he called “mean and nasty.”

“Nobody was out. Nobody was even walking their dogs,” he said. “Nothing was going on for two days.”

Snowfall totals were hard to gauge, he added, because of fierce winds that reduced accumulation between houses, but piled up a 5-foot drift “in front of my garage.”

Hochul told reporters on Sunday that the Biden administration had agreed to support her request for a federal disaster declaration.

About 200 National Guard troops were mobilized in western New York to help police and fire crews, conduct wellness checks and bring supplies to shelters, Hochul said.

The larger storm system was moving east on Sunday, after knocking out power to as many as 1.5 million customers at the height of outages late last week and forcing thousands of commercial flight cancellations during the busy holiday travel period.

More than 150,000 U.S. homes and businesses were without power on Sunday, down sharply from the 1.8 million without power as of early Saturday, according to PowerOutage.us. In Buffalo, 15,000 residents were still without electricity on Sunday evening, Poloncarz said.

He said one electrical substation knocked offline was sealed off by an 18-foot-tall mound of snow, and utility crews found the entire facility frozen inside.

Christmas Day temperatures, while beginning to rebound from near-zero readings that were widespread on Saturday, remained well below average across the central and eastern United States, and below freezing even as far south as the Gulf Coast, National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologist Rich Otto said.

Nearly 4 feet of snow was measured at Buffalo airport by Sunday, according to the latest NWS tally, with white-out conditions lingering south of Buffalo into the afternoon as continuing squalls dumped 2-3 inches of snow an hour.

In Kentucky, officials confirmed three storm-related deaths since Friday, while at least four people were dead and several injured in auto-related accidents in Ohio, where a 50-vehicle pileup shut down the Ohio Turnpike during a blizzard on Friday.

Other deaths related to extreme cold or weather-induced vehicle accidents were reported in Missouri, Tennessee, Kansas and Colorado, according to news reports.

Related Galleries:

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.

Related Galleries:

TACOMA, Wash. (AP) — Vandalism at three power substations in western Washington early Sunday initially cut power to about 14,000 utility customers, the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office said.

The attacks come as federal officials are warning that the U.S. power grid needs better security to prevent domestic terrorism and after a large outage in North Carolina earlier this month that took days to repair.

In January, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security report warned that domestic extremists have been developing “credible, specific plans” to attack electricity infrastructure since at least 2020.

Tacoma Public Utilities reported vandalism at about 5:30 a.m. Sunday at one substation, followed by vandalism at a second substation, the sheriff’s office said. The outages affected about 7,300 customers in an area southeast of Tacoma. Just before noon, the utility had restored power to all but 2,700 customers whose power was estimated to be restored at about 6:30 p.m. Sunday.

Meanwhile, just before noon, Puget Sound Energy reported vandalism that had happened at about 2:30 a.m. Sunday caused a power outage at one of its substations. The nearly 7,700 customers who lost power had it restored by 5 a.m., Puget Sound spokesperson Andrew Padula said. The company is investigating, along with authorities, and declined to comment further, Padula said.

In all three cases, the sheriff’s office says someone forced their way into the fenced area surrounding the substations and damaged equipment to cause a power outage.

Officials have not said how the substations were damaged. No suspects are in custody and officials don’t know if it was a coordinated attack.

Oregon Public Broadcasting and KUOW-FM in Seattle reported earlier this month that Portland General Electric, the Bonneville Power Administration, Cowlitz County Public Utility District and Puget Sound Energy confirmed six separate attacks on electrical substations in Washington and Oregon in the previous weeks.

© Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved.