KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Powerful explosions from shelling shook Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, the site of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, the global nuclear watchdog said Sunday, calling for “urgent measures to help prevent a nuclear accident” in the Russian-occupied facility.

A heavy barrage of Russian military strikes — almost 400 on Sunday alone — also hit Ukraine’s eastern regions, and fierce ground battles shook the eastern Donetsk province, Ukraine’s president said in his evening update.

Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said multiple explosions near the plant — on Saturday evening and again on Sunday morning — abruptly ended a period of relative calm around the nuclear facility that has been the site of fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces since Russia invaded on Feb. 24.

The fighting has raised the specter of a nuclear catastrophe ever since Russian troops occupied the plant during the early days of the war.

In renewed shelling both close to and at the site, IAEA experts at the Zaporizhzhia facility reported hearing more than a dozen blasts within a short period Sunday morning and could see some explosions from their windows, the agency said.

Later in the day, the IAEA said the shelling had stopped and that its experts would assess the situation on Monday.

“There has been damage to parts of the site, but no radiation release or loss of power,” the agency said.

Still, Grossi called the shelling “extremely disturbing,” and appealed to both sides to urgently implement a nuclear safety and security zone around the facility.

“Whoever is behind this, it must stop immediately,” he said. “As I have said many times before, you’re playing with fire!”

Russia has been pounding Ukraine’s power grid and other infrastructure from the air, causing widespread blackouts and leaving millions of Ukrainians without heat, power or water as frigid cold and snow blankets the capital, Kyiv, and other cities.

Ukraine’s state nuclear power operator, Energoatom, said Russian forces were behind the shelling of the Zaporizhzhia plant, and that the equipment targeted was consistent with the Kremlin’s intent “to damage or destroy as much of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure as possible” as winter sets in.

The weekend strikes damaged the system that would enable the plant’s power units 5 and 6 to start producing electricity again for Ukraine, the power operator said. The State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine hopes to bring the two units to a minimally controlled power level to obtain steam, which is critical in winter for ensuring the safety of the plant and the surrounding area, Energoatom said.

Moscow, meanwhile, blamed Ukrainian forces for the damage. Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov accused the Ukrainians of shelling the power plant twice on Sunday and said two shells hit near power lines supplying the plant with electricity.

Elsewhere in the Zaporizhzhia region, Russian forces shelled civilian infrastructure in about a dozen communities, destroying 30 homes, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office said Sunday. Twenty buildings were damaged in shelling at Nikopol, a city across the river from the Zaporizhzhia plant, it said.

In his evening address, Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces were making small gains in the eastern Luhansk region and were holding their ground in battles in the south.

Blackouts were scheduled Sunday night in 15 regions of Ukraine and the city of Kyiv, Zelenskyy said. The country’s power utility, meanwhile, said there would be scheduled outages in every region on Monday.

“The restoration of networks and technical supply capabilities, the de-mining of power transmission lines, repairs — everything goes on round the clock,” Zelenskyy said.

Three districts in the northern Kharkiv region — Kupyansk, Chuguiv and Izyum — also came under Russian artillery fire.

The situation in the southern Kherson region “remains difficult,” the president’s office said, citing Ukraine’s armed forces. Russian forces fired tank shells, rockets and other artillery on the city of Kherson and several nearby settlements that were recently liberated by Ukrainian forces.

Shelling late Saturday struck an oil depot in Kherson, igniting a huge fire that sent billowing smoke into the air. Russian troops also shelled people lining up to get bread in Bilozerka, a town in the Kherson province, wounding five, the report said.

In the city of Kherson — which still has little power, heat or water — more than 80 tons of humanitarian aid have been sent, said local official Yaroslav Yanushevych, including a UNICEF shipment of 1,500 winter outfits for children, two 35-40-kilowatt generators and drinking water.

Also on Sunday, a funeral was held in eastern Poland for the second of two men killed in a missile explosion Tuesday. The other man was buried Saturday. Poland and the head of NATO have both said the missile strike appeared to be unintentional, and was probably launched by Ukraine as it tried to shoot down Russia missiles.

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Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin contributed.

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Follow all AP stories about the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.

The republican basterds suffered an inglorious defeat in the midterms. And many of them aren’t taking it well. “You’re a bunch of p#ssies!” That there is basterd one, maniac, and human garbage dump Steve Bannon. Bannon is enraged at the FBI and DOJ for appointing a special counsel.

Bannon lashed out at them on his trashy war room podcast. But we know much of Bannon’s anger really comes from all the republican losses from this year’s midterm. “Shrek-like Monster!”

That there is basterd Donald Trump — who reportedly uttered those words in fury speaking about Mehmet Oz. Trump reportedly is furious at Mehmet for losing and wants nothing to do with Mehmet now.

“We have to have the gavel!”

That there’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, who keeps on with making an utter fool of herself, demanding that the Department of Justice be defunded, which can’t happen. Then there is Kari Lake, who is still — STILL — engaged in her unending temper tantrum on Twitter. At this point, one wonders if she’s eaten or slept since the election. What she HAS done is scream — not that it will do her any good.

“I am so pissed off”

“The country is screwed!”

That there is inglourious (VERY inglourious) Ted Cruz losing his shit because — because he’s Ted Cruz.

“Hunter Biden!” That there is Gym Jordan, who has not shut up about Hunter Biden in many days. These and many others comprise the inglorious basterds of the GOP. They’re silly. They’re stupid. And they’re definitely inglorious.

The post These fools are stepping in it already appeared first on Palmer Report.

In an upscale Seoul neighbourhood two years ago, a white Tesla Model X smashed into a parking lot wall. The fiery crash killed a prominent lawyer – a close friend of South Korea’s president.

Prosecutors have charged the driver with involuntary manslaughter. He blames Tesla.

Choi Woan-jong, who had eked out a living by driving drunk people home in their own cars, says the Model X sped out of control on its own and that the brakes failed in the December 2020 accident.

The criminal trial about to begin in South Korea hangs on questions about the safety of Tesla cars, at a time when the EV maker faces a range of lawsuits and increased scrutiny by regulators.

Choi, 61, is now unable to find work as an independent driver, or what is known in Korea as a “replacement driver”.

He says he suffers flashbacks and depression ahead of a trial that pits his credibility against the world’s most valuable automaker.

“When I wake up, I feel abandoned, floating alone in the middle of the ocean,” said Choi, who underwent surgery after the crash for a ruptured intestine.

Tesla did not respond to written requests for comment about the crash and Choi’s case. A lawyer for the family of Yoon Hong-geun, who owned the car and died in the crash, declined to comment.

Choi’s case has drawn the attention of some safety advocates in South Korea who want to change a provision in the free trade agreement with the United States that exempts Tesla from local standards.

For instance, Tesla is not required to follow South Korean regulations that require at least one front-seat and back-seat door to have a mechanical failsafe because the U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement exempts carmakers with sales under 50,000 vehicles from local safety rules.

Tesla sold 17,828 vehicles in South Korea in 2021, registration data shows.

Park Keun-oh, an official from the Korea-U.S. FTA division of South Korea’s trade ministry, said the exemption clause requires Tesla to abide by American safety regulations, which do not require mechanical backup latch. Such latches allow doors to be opened even if the car does not have electrical power.

Park declined to comment further. The Office of the United States Trade Representative did not respond to requests for comment about the trade deal or the regulations.

Prosecutors say Choi floored the accelerator as he entered the garage of a Seoul apartment building, hitting 95 kph (60mph) before crashing. He denies that, saying the car’s side mirrors began folding in and out uncommanded just before the car accelerated on its own.

“It felt like the car was swept away by a hurricane,” said Choi, who said he had been driving for more than 20 years and had experience driving Teslas.

The automaker provided prosecutors with data from the Model X that the car transmitted in the moments before the crash, the judge said at a preliminary hearing. The defence team has asked to see the data and is waiting for the court to release it.

Choi and his lawyer are seeking to show that the car’s electrical systems failed and that its design slowed firefighters’ attempts to rescue Yoon.

The Tesla’s battery caught fire after the crash. Smoke and flames filled the car, according to firefighters and a video of the scene, taken by firefighters and viewed by Reuters.

Choi escaped through a broken window on his side. Firefighters were delayed in pulling Yoon out of the back seat, because the Model X’s electronic doors failed to open from outside, a Dec. 31, 2020, fire department report reviewed by Reuters shows. The report does not say how long the rescue was delayed.

Yoon, 60, was pronounced dead after firefighters extricated him from the car and performed CPR. The cause of death was not made public.

Judge Park Won-gyu said that he plans to call Tesla engineers to testify and that the safety of Tesla vehicles would be examined at trial. Involuntary manslaughter carries a potential prison sentence of up to five years.

The investigation by the fire station that responded found the battery failure slowed the emergency response by disabling seat controls, which prevented firefighters from repositioning the front seats so they could get to Yoon, according to the fire department report.

The electrical outage made it “impossible to secure space for the (rescue) operation”, the report said.

A fire station representative declined to comment.

The report says exterior door handles on the Model X, which are electronic, did not open from the outside as the battery burned. It also says firefighters could not pull Yoon from the car because they couldn’t move the front seats after the battery died.

A video of the rescue shows firefighters trying but failing to open the Model X’s wing-style doors. They eventually broke through the front windshield and pulled Yoon from the car about 25 minutes after the emergency call came in, according to the footage and the firefighters’ report.

Tesla is the only automaker that does not provide data to the Korea Transportation Safety Authority (TS) from onboard diagnostic systems for safety checks in South Korea, according to the agency and Park Sang-hyuk, a lawmaker with the opposition Democratic Party of Korea who, spurred by Choi’s crash, has campaigned for regulators to pressure Tesla to change its door handles and work with regulators.

TS noted that Tesla is not legally required to provide such data, but that all other foreign and domestic carmakers are doing so.

Park and TS said Tesla is working with the agency to allow Korean owners to access their car’s diagnostic data starting in October 2023.

“Tesla has become something of an icon for great innovation, but I think (the company’s issues in Korea) also raise a serious concern for customers here,” Park said, referring to cases in which Tesla’s doors will not open after a collision, and the free trade agreement provisions.

A South Korean consumer group, Citizens United for Consumer Sovereignty, said in September that Tesla had not fixed what the group calls “door defects”. The group says it has collected information on about 1,870 complaints involving Tesla doors over the past four years. Data provided to Reuters by another South Korean lawmaker, and TS, confirmed that number.

The consumer group said that it asked police to investigate Tesla over not improving driver and passenger safety after the fatal crash in Seoul, but that police told them in May there was not enough evidence to proceed, according to their report, seen by Reuters.

In a June 29 letter to the consumer group, seen by Reuters, police say that although Tesla’s door latches might violate local safety standards, that consideration was trumped by the terms of the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement.

Tesla doors “could be in violation of the (local) regulations, but it (Tesla) has no obligations to comply with local motor vehicle safety standards in accordance with the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement,” the police letter said.

In South Korean courts, drivers in cases where a crash’s cause is disputed face the burden of proving the car had a defect, three legal and auto safety experts say, and vehicle manufacturers are almost never prosecuted over safety issues.

“Unless you have gone through this, you will never know how it feels,” said Ahn Ho-joon, another “replacement driver” in South Korea, who had a Tesla accident in May nearly identical to Choi’s, police records show.

Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.

Ahn, one of the few to attend all of Choi’s pre-trial hearings, says the Tesla he drove also accelerated on its own and crashed into two vehicles in an underground garage, but there were no serious injuries. Police say the accident was his fault because there were no issues with the vehicle, but did not charge him because the wreck was minor.

Ahn said he has kept his job as an independent replacement driver, but declines to drive Teslas.

Choi, unable to work and nearly out of money, has moved into a 6.6-square-metre (71-square-foot) cubicle he rents for 350,000 won ($243) a month. Financed by state housing subsidies, it includes a shared bathroom and kitchen, and all the rice he can eat. Despite these hardships, Choi takes the long view on Tesla.

“Obviously there’s a process to make products perfect through trial and error. And I am just destined to be part of that process,” he said.

A gunman opened fire inside a LGBTQ nightspot in Colorado Springs late on Saturday, killing at least five people and injuring 25 others before being stopped by “heroic” clubgoers, police said.

Authorities on Sunday said they were investigating whether the attack was motivated by hate.

Police identified the suspect as Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22, and said he used a “long rifle.” He was taken into police custody shortly after the shooting began and was being treated for injuries, according to officials.

The shooting was reminiscent of the 2016 Pulse club massacre when a gunman killed 49 people at the gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, before he was fatally shot by police.

It unfolded as LGBTQ communities and allies around the world prepared to mark the Transgender Day of Remembrance on Sunday, an annual observance to honor victims of transphobic violence.

Club Q, a long-standing venue in a modest strip mall, was described by many as a safe haven for the LGBTQ community in Colorado’s second-largest city.

Police said the initial phone call about the shooting came in just before midnight, and that the suspect was apprehended within minutes thanks to the quick action of law enforcement and the bravery of at least two patrons who intervened.

The shooter burst in with a rifle, a military-style flak jacket and what appeared to be six magazines of ammunition, the New York Times reported, citing the club owners, who said they did not know the man.

Multiple firearms were found at the venue, including the rifle, Colorado Springs Police Chief Adrian Vasquez told a news conference on Sunday.

One patron, Joshua Thurman, choked up as he told reporters that he was dancing in the club when he first heard gunshots. He sought refuge in a dressing room and locked himself inside with others, praying for his life and thinking about loved ones.

“We heard everything,” Thurman said. “We heard more shots fired. We heard the assailant being beat up by someone that I assumed that tackled him. We heard the police come in. We heard them yelling at him. We heard them saying, ‘Take certain people because they’re critical.'”

Several of the injured were in critical condition and being treated at local hospitals, authorities said.

Club Q called the incident a “hate attack” in a statement on Facebook and thanked the “heroic customers” for subduing the gunman.

Anxiety within many LGBTQ communities in the United States has risen amid a divisive political climate and after a string of threats and violent incidents targeting LGBTQ people and events in recent months.

In a statement condemning the violence, President Joe Biden said Americans must not tolerate hate.

“Places that are supposed to be safe spaces of acceptance and celebration should never be turned into places of terror and violence,” Biden said.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis, who in 2018 became the first openly gay man in the country to be elected as a governor, called the shooting a “senseless act of evil.”

“I feel that same pit in my stomach that so many of you today do, a feeling sadly all too familiar,” Polis said in a video appearance during a vigil held at a local church.

A spokesperson for the city of Colorado Springs said authorities were aware of a 2021 bomb threat involving an individual with the same name and birth date as the suspect, but have not officially confirmed he is one and the same.

Colorado has a grim history of mass violence, including the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School, a 2012 rampage inside a movie theater in a Denver suburb and a supermarket attack that killed 10 people last year.

Mourners laid flowers outside the club on Sunday as Colorado Springs resident Mark Travis, a former police chaplain, played “Taps” on his bugle.

“We could go in and forget about work and everything else and feel like it was a home,” Travis said of the club.

The shooting, he said, had ripped away that sense of comfort. “It’s akin to, I guess being burglarized or something that much worse. You’re not even safe in your own home.”

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U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris will reaffirm American commitments to the defence of the Philippines when she meets with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in Manila on Monday, a senior U.S. administration official said.

Harris, whose three-day trip to the Philippines includes a stop on the islands of Palawan on the edge of the South China Sea, will also reaffirm Washington’s support for a 2016 international tribunal ruling that invalidated China’s expansive claim in the disputed waterway.

“The vice president will underscore our commitment to stand up for the international rules and norms because we recognise the impact that that has on Philippine lives and livelihoods,” the U.S. official said.

Beijing claims some territories in the waters off Palawan and much of the South China Sea, citing China’s own historical maps. The 2016 ruling by an arbitration tribunal in The Hague, however, said the Chinese claims had no legal basis, delivering a victory for Manila.

But the Philippines has been unable to enforce the ruling and has since filed hundreds of protests over what it calls encroachment and harassment by China’s coast guard and its vast fishing fleet.

Harris’ visit would be the highest-level trip to the Philippines by a Biden administration official and marks a sharp turnaround in relations, which were strained by former President Rodrigo Duterte’s animosity toward Washington and his embrace of Beijing.

“The vice president will tell President Marcos that we are pleased to see our security ties in such strong position,” the U.S. official said.

Washington and the Philippines have moved ahead with an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) that dates back to the Obama administration and that languished under Duterte.

EDCA allows the United States to maintain a military presence, but not a permanent one, in its former colony through the rotation of ships and aircraft for humanitarian and maritime security operations in mutually agreed Philippine bases.

The United States has proposed adding more EDCA sites to the current five “to deepen our work together,” the U.S. official said, adding that Washington has allocated $82 million to complete 21 projects on the five existing locations.

Last week, Philippine military chief Bartolome Bacarro said the United States had proposed including five more bases in the EDCA, including one in Palawan.

Harris is scheduled on Tuesday to meet with coast guard officials and tour a coast guard vessel in Palawan and speak about “principles of sovereignty territorial integrity and freedom of navigation,” the U.S. official said.

Apart from security cooperation, the visit aims to strengthen Washington’s partnership with the Philippines across a range of issues, including on climate action, nuclear cooperation, and food security, the digital economy, and health and maritime cooperation, the official said.

Island nations are under threat from rising seas. Drought threatens wide swathes of Africa. And flooding will inundate countries across the globe.

For years, the developing countries most vulnerable to climate change warned of these threats and demanded that their wealthier counterparts help pay to address these climate-induced losses. Wealthy countries, who have caused the problem with decades of burning fossil fuels unchecked, instead insisted that they would help vulnerable countries expand clean energy and fund efforts to adapt to extreme weather. Paying to address so-called loss and damage, it seemed, represented a bridge too far.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

This week, the dam finally broke. At COP27, the United Nations climate conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, that concluded early Sunday morning, delegates from countries around the world agreed to create a fund to funnel money from the Global North to the Global South to help pay for the mounting costs of climate-related damages. Nations also accelerated a program to provide technical assistance to vulnerable countries. And they called for a reworking of institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to address climate-linked loss and damage.

All told, the result represents a groundbreaking shift in how the world understands climate policy. Yes, climate policy is partly about solar panels and wind turbines, elevating streets and building sea walls. But now it is officially, for the first time at this global scale, also about paying for the inevitable losses.

“This is the start of a new paradigm that truly accounts for the burdens of climate change,” said Lia Nicholson, a negotiator representing the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) at the conference’s closing session. “Establishing this fund signals to the world that loss and damage will no longer solely be borne by those governments and people least responsible; today is a step towards climate justice.”

This step forward brings the world into a new era of climate policy where paying to compensate for the worsening effects of climate change receives top billing in international climate discussions—and questions of how to pay for it enters the conversation in capitals of developed countries around the world. COP27 concludes a hard fought battle—but it also marks a beginning; and decisions made over the next few years will define what this new paradigm looks like.

The push for policies to address loss and damage dates back to the very beginning of U.N. discussions on climate change. In 1991, then the chair of AOSIS, the island nation of Vanuatu proposed a scheme to pay small island states when their land became unlivable as a result of sea level rise. From the beginning, those conversations were sidelined and kicked down the road by big developed countries whose negotiators feared that recognizing loss and damage would open up rich countries to unlimited liability. In major climate conferences over the coming decades, vulnerable countries repeatedly raised the topic with paltry results.

But ignoring a problem will not make it go away. Climate-linked damages have accelerated in recent years and many delegates gathered in Egypt agreed that the devastation of recent months made the loss and damage conversation impossible to sidestep. “We listened to the cause of anguish and despair resonating from one end of Pakistan to the other—a country with literally more than a third of its area flooded, a resounding alarm of the future that awaits us,” said Sameh Shoukry, the Egyptian Foreign Minister who served as COP27 president, as the talks came to a close.

And so over the past two weeks negotiators haggled over the details of what such a fund might entail. Crucial questions involved who might receive funding and who should contribute. Developed countries remained adamant that the fund should be open to a range of finance sources—including from countries like China that have become big emitters, even though they weren’t 30 years ago when the U.N. climate process was established. At the same time, developed nations sought to prevent finance from going to countries like Saudi Arabia, which are technically developing countries but have access to far greater means than many of their more vulnerable counterparts. Both of these questions remain to be determined in the coming years. Delegates also debated how contributing countries might finance these programs. A suggestion from the European Union that taxes be levied on fossil fuels, air travel, and shipping to pay for loss and damage raised eyebrows across negotiation teams.

“The establishment of a funding mechanism is the story of COP27, and a huge milestone,” says Cassie Flynn, head of climate policy at the United Nations Development Program. But “this is just the beginning of the journey on funding for loss and damage, and negotiators are going to have to face some questions very quickly around brass tacks: who provides into this fund, who can receive into this fund?”

No matter what happens, no one expects the new fund to provide sufficient finance to actually address the scale of the loss and damage challenge, and so a range of other solutions have been presented. Over the course of the conference, delegates discussed an insurance scheme organized by Germany to help cover certain losses, and the creation of a program known as the Santiago Network that will provide technical assistance to vulnerable countries. A proposal from Barbados to alleviate the debt of cash-strapped developing countries as they struggle with climate challenges gained support from countries across the globe, rich and poor, large and small. The topic will rank high on the agenda in the months ahead of the IMF and World Bank’s spring meetings.

“Loss and damage is a complex issue that impacts our immediate, medium, and long term,” Shauna Aminath, the minister of environment, climate change, and technology in the Maldives told other delegates on the morning of Nov. 20. “We need a mosaic of solutions.”

It may not be clear at first glance, but, between the lines, the COP27 deal also contained a win of sorts for big developed countries like the U.S. Those wealthy nations successfully fought back any attempt to be held formally liable; contributions to the loss and damage fund will be voluntary. After the decision had been finalized, a U.S. State Department official noted that “there is no liability or compensation in the agreement.” In the coming years, it’s safe to assume that lawyers from the U.S. will fight tooth and nail to ensure the fund stays that way.

But the conversation will inevitably evolve. On Friday, Vanuatu announced that 86 countries now support its plan to request the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the U.N.’s judicial body, to issue an advisory opinion on countries’ obligations to address climate change. Vanuatu plans to bring the issue to the U.N. General Assembly in December, and, if passed, the ICJ will take up the issue to offer an opinion that includes what rich countries owe for their historic emissions. It’s an opinion that could influence a range of court rulings around the globe.

“It will impact everything,” says Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s climate minister. “If you were sitting opposite someone, and you’re both equally aware that there are these legally defined obligations, perhaps there is now a shadow of a stick.”

It’s clear the conversation is only just beginning.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, newsletter)

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