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Ukraine said its troops were holding out against pro-Moscow forces in the eastern salt mining town of Soledar as more than 500 civilians including children were trapped there.

* The ultra-nationalist contract militia Wagner, run by an ally of Russian President Putin, claims to have taken Soledar after intense fighting that it said had left the town strewn with Ukrainian dead.

* Moscow has held off officially proclaiming victory.

* Ukraine has acknowledged Russian advances and said fighting was still fierce in Soledar.

* A capture of Soledar, which had a pre-war population 10,000, would be Moscow’s most substantial gain since a series of retreats throughout much of the second half of 2022.

* Moscow’s February invasion of Ukraine, the biggest land war in Europe since World War Two, has resulted in more than 50,000 reports of alleged war crimes, said Ukraine’s top war crimes prosecutor Yuriy Belousov. read more

* The reports of alleged torture by pro-Moscow forces include electric shocks to genitals and other parts of the body, beatings, various forms of suffocation and sexual violence.

* Kremlin-watchers are examining Russia’s latest switch of battlefield leadership after Valery Gerasimov, chief of the military’s general staff, was unexpectedly given direct command of the invasion.

* Russia could raise the upper age limit for citizens to be conscripted as soon as this spring, a senior lawmaker has said, as part of Moscow’s plans to boost the number of Russian troops by 30%.

* The commander of Russian ground forces visited Ukraine’s neighbour Belarus to inspect a joint force stationed there.

* For now, northwest Ukraine’s border with Belarus is a landscape of burst river banks, thick mud and waterlogged fields, so a Russian assault from there soon seems unlikely.

* Russian state budget revenue from oil taxes declined in December to 511.7 billion roubles ($7.6 billion), the lowest since March 2021, according to data from the Finance Ministry, following a slide in oil prices.

* Car sales in Russia collapsed by 58.8% in 2022, the Association of European Businesses (AEB) said, as the industry reels from the impact of Western sanctions.

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At least six people were killed in central Alabama on Thursday as thunderstorms and at least one tornado swept through the region, local officials said.

An Autauga County Sheriff’s spokeswoman confirmed to Reuters that six people had died in the storm, but she said she had no further details.

“I am sad to have learned that six Alabamians were lost to the storms that ravaged across our state. My prayers are with their loved ones and communities. We are far too familiar with devastating weather, but our people are resilient. We will get through it and be stronger for it,” Alabama Governor Kay Ivey said on Twitter.

Autauga County Coroner Buster Barber said that at least four people had been killed by flying debris hurled by the tornado. Barber said he had no further in formation on the deceased.

Ivey on Thursday declared a state of emergency for six Alabama counties hit hardest by the storm: Autauga, Chambers, Coosa, Dallas, Elmore and Tallapoosa.

The high winds and heavy rain damaged homes and left tens of thousands of customers without power in parts of Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama.

More than 250 flights were canceled or delayed at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Charlotte Douglas International Airport.

Lisa Marie Presley, the only daughter of rock ‘n’ roll legend Elvis Presley, died on Thursday after being rushed to a Los Angeles-area hospital suffering from cardiac arrest, according to media reports.

Lisa Marie Presley, a musician and the only daughter of rock ‘n’ roll legend Elvis Presley, died on Thursday after being rushed to a Los Angeles-area hospital, her mother said.

“It is with a heavy heart that I must share the devastating news that my beautiful daughter Lisa Marie has left us,” her mother, Priscilla Presley, said in a statement. Lisa Marie Presley was 54.

“She was the most passionate, strong and loving woman I have ever known. We ask for privacy as we try to deal with this profound loss,” the statement added.

Lisa Marie Presley suffered cardiac arrest in her home in the Los Angeles suburb of Calabasas, according to entertainment website TMZ. She was then taken to hospital on Thursday.

She was born in 1968 and was the owner of her father’s Graceland mansion in Memphis, a popular tourist attraction. She was nine years old when Elvis died at Graceland in 1977.

Her own music career began with a 2003 debut album “To Whom It May Concern.” It was followed by 2005’s “Now What,” and both hit the top 10 of the Billboard 200 album chart.

A third album, “Storm and Grace,” was released in 2012.

She was married four times. She wed pop star Michael Jackson, in 1994, just 20 days after her divorce from her first husband, musician Danny Keough.

The high-profile couple divorced in 1996 as Jackson was battling child molestation allegations.

Presley married actor Nicholas Cage, a huge fan of her father, in 2002. Cage filed for divorce four months later.

Her fourth marriage was to her guitarist and music producer Michael Lockwood. Their divorce was finalized in 2021.

She had four children. Her only son, Benjamin Keough, died in 2020 at age 27. Daughter Riley Keough, 33, is an actress.

Her two other daughters are twins Harper and Finley Lockwood, 14.

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(JTA) — In a shocking development, the embattled founder of Germany’s non-Orthodox rabbinical schools has relinquished his ownership stake in them to the Jewish Community of Berlin.

The 25,000 euro transaction means that Rabbi Walter Homolka is no longer in control of the Reform Abraham Geiger College and the Conservative Zacharias Frankel College at the University of Potsdam.

The sale achieves a result that the Central Council of Jews in Germany, the seminaries’ main funder, has been trying to reach openly since late last year, after two investigations confirmed that Homolka had abused his power at the seminaries.

The Jewish Community of Berlin had not publicly been part of the efforts to overhaul the schools launched after allegations against Homolka broke into public view last May. The allegations initially related to a sexual harassment scandal involving his husband, who was also his employee, but widened to implicate other aspects of Homolka’s leadership.

The group’s announcement late Wednesday of the purchase, executed the day before, initially alarmed some who have been advocating for changes at the seminaries, because the plan did not clearly rule out a role for Homolka. The Central Council of Jews in Germany issued a statement lambasting the fact that the deal “took place without consultation with the students, employees, or the donors” and said the new arrangement would not improve rabbinical education in Germany.

But in a hastily arranged meeting Thursday, Berlin Jewish Community President Gideon Joffe assured Josef Schuster, the council’s head, that Homolka would not be part of the seminaries going forward. The meeting left Schuster prepared to collaborate with Joffe’s group, a spokesperson for the council confirmed.

Now, the path is clear for the official Jewish community to seize authority over non-Orthodox rabbinical training in the country where Reform Judaism was born in the 19th century.

“This may not be the ideal situation, but it is a compromise that allows almost everyone to live with the results,” Cantor Itamar Cohen, the graduate whose complaint kicked off the scandal, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He said he would fully embrace the offer “if it is accepted by Klal Israel, the majority of the Jewish community as encapsulated in the main representing bodies.”

Concerns about the surprise announcement largely reflected worries that Homolka could have structured the deal in a way that benefits him.

Two separate investigations — one by the university and the other by lawyers commissioned  by the Central Council — recently determined that Homolka had created an “atmosphere of fear” among students and staff in the very institutions he launched more than 20 years ago. The final report from the Central Council investigation is expected to be released in the coming weeks. Homolka has steadfastly maintained his innocence.

In the wake of those findings, there was an increasing appearance of desperation on the part of the old guard to hold on to control of the two seminaries. In December, days after the damning Central Council interim report was issued, the Union of Progressive Judaism in Germany — with a newly elected board friendly to Homolka — announced it had replaced the interim director of the Geiger College with its own appointee. The Central Council promptly nixed that plan, calling the Union of Progressive Judaism a puppet of Homolka and announcing its appointment of the scholar Gerhard Robbers to work on restructuring the two colleges.

Skeptics of the latest development said they were sure Homolka’s influence would emerge somewhere, for example in appointments to the reconstituted institutions.

“I don’t find this reassuring,” said Nick Hoermann, a current student at Frankel College. “It has been clear for a while now that Homolka’s only way to act in the future would be through back doors.”

But for now at least, the Central Council — which initially called the sale announcement “astonishing” — says it is ready to work with the Jewish Community of Berlin.

Though the official community’s move came as a surprise to many, Joffe and his team had been considering some kind of rescue maneuver since the scandal broke last May, Ilan Kiesling, a spokesperson for the community, said in an email to JTA. The concrete plan emerged only after the damning preliminary expert opinion came out in December.

Joffe approached Homolka directly at that point and convinced him “that a completely fresh start at [Abraham Geiger College] was indispensable – together with a complete renunciation of all his leadership positions. Rabbi Homolka agreed to this renunciation and transferred all shares of the non-profit limited company to the community,” Kiesling wrote.

The legally binding takeover took place this week, and did not cost the community anything beyond “the capital contribution of the limited company in the amount of 25,000 euros,” Kiesling said.

He added that the community “guarantees a complete and transparent new start” for the Geiger seminary. “There will no longer be an accumulation of offices” under one person, one of the habits for which Homolka has been criticized. There was no specific reference to the Frankel College, which until now has appointed its own academic leadership.

The community plans to establish an international advisory board and an external contact point for students to report any problems. Early on in the scandal, it emerged that Cohen’s complaint had been investigated internally, by parties beholden to Homolka.

Kiesling also told the JTA that the community had engaged a former community president, Rabbi Andreas Nachama, chair of Germany’s liberal rabbinical conference, known as ARK, to advise them from a rabbinical perspective. Nachama was ordained by the U.S.-based Alliance for Jewish Renewal movement and leads an egalitarian Reform congregation in Berlin.

In his statement Wednesday, Joffe said, “The top priority for us at the moment is to bring the Abraham Geiger College into calm waters and pave the way for the students to continue their education in a stable structure.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post In a twist, German rabbi at scandal’s center cedes rabbinical school ownership to Berlin Jews appeared first on The Forward.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Lisa Marie Presley — the only child of Elvis Presley — died Thursday after being hospitalized earlier that day, her mother said in a statement. The singer was 54.

“It is with a heavy heart that I must share the devastating news that my beautiful daughter Lisa Marie has left us,” Priscilla Presley said in a statement. “She was the most passionate, strong and loving woman I have ever known.”

The announcement came just hours after Priscilla Presley had confirmed that Lisa Marie Presley was rushed to the hospital earlier Thursday.

Los Angeles County paramedics were dispatched to a Calabasas home at 10:37 a.m. following a report of a woman in full cardiac arrest, according to Craig Little, a spokesperson for the county’s fire department. Property records indicate Presley was a resident at that address.

Paramedics arrived about six minutes later, Little said. A subsequent statement from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said paramedics performed CPR and “determined the patient had signs of life” before taking her to a hospital in nearby West Hills immediately.

The city of Calabasas is nestled between the foothills of the Santa Monica and the Santa Susanna Mountains, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) northwest of downtown Los Angeles.

News of Presley’s hospitalization was first reported by TMZ and later confirmed by People magazine.

Presley, 54, attended the Golden Globes on Tuesday, on hand to celebrate Austin Butler’s award for playing her father in “Elvis.” She called his performance “mind-blowing” during a red carpet interview with “Entertainment Tonight.”

“I really didn’t know what to do with myself after I saw it,” she told ET of Baz Luhrmann’s movie. “I had to take, like, five days to process it because it was so incredible and so spot on and just so authentic that, yeah, I can’t even describe what it meant.”

Just days before that, she was in Memphis, Tennessee, at Graceland — the mansion where Elvis lived — to celebrate her father’s birth anniversary on Jan. 8.

Presley had recently penned an essay published in People about “the horrific reality” of her grief following her son Benjamin Keough’s death by suicide in 2020. Presley is also the mother of actor Riley Keough and twin daughters.

“I’ve dealt with death, grief and loss since the age of 9 years old. I’ve had more than anyone’s fair share of it in my lifetime and somehow, I’ve made it this far,” she wrote in August.

This story is developing. Refresh for updates.

Residents of China are increasingly on the move after the country’s sudden reversal last month of heavy COVID-19 curbs, despite a surge in infections, pointing to a gradual recovery in consumption and economic activity this year.

Mobility and spending data — from subway passenger traffic in three of China’s biggest cities to flight volumes to box office collections — show upticks since late December, after Beijing abruptly ended three years of “zero-COVID” policy earlier in the month.

Still, some indicators show activity has not fully recovered to levels of just a few months ago, and many economists remain cautious about the pace of revival following the faster-than-expected reopening.

“The pullback in retail spending has been increasingly broad-based, suggesting that it will take time to reverse the negative psychological impact on Chinese consumers brought on by three years of episodic lockdowns,” said Louise Loo, senior economist at Oxford Economics.

COVID-related lockdowns and curbs have bit into travel, moviegoing and car-buying last spring and again at the start of winter, data from information providers and industry bodies showed.

In addition, Loo said a speedy recovery is also hampered by shifts in household liquidity positions over the course of the pandemic.

“Unlike the outright cash payoff schemes seen in Hong Kong and Singapore that go some way in supporting household spending, China’s COVID-relief programmes have instead focused predominantly on supporting businesses affected by lockdowns,” she said.

Policymakers have promised to boost demand this year, especially consumption.

But spending in other major economies has lost steam due to surging interest rates aimed at taming inflation, which is hurting China’s exports, which were a rare bright spot for its economy during the pandemic era.

An official factory activity survey showed a sub-index of new export orders has remained in contraction territory for 20 consecutive months. The figure declined to 44.2 in December from 46.7 in November. The 50-point mark separates contraction from growth on a monthly basis.

Employment in the massive manufacturing sector is under pressure too, according to the survey, likely due to muted production levels and difficulties sourcing workers amid the virus outbreaks, according to analysts.

Economists expect the world’s second-largest economy to pick up from the second quarter, underpinned by stronger consumption and increased state outlays on infrastructure projects. But a recovery in the country’s embattled property market could take much longer.