Michael Novakhov retweeted:

Liberty, equality, fraternity.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Michael Novakhov retweeted:

Около 13 тысяч украинских военных погибли с 24 февраля, заявил Михаил Подоляк. По его словам, Урсула фон дер Ляйен ошиблась, говоря о 100-тысячных потерях. А вот потери среди гражданского населения больше 20 тысяч, о которых заявили в ЕК, уверен Подоляк p.dw.com/p/4K8of?maca=r…

Michael Novakhov retweeted:

Юрты и шаманов из Бурятии отправят на оккупированные территории Донбасса. “Только шаманы могут душу возвращать”, – пояснил “Сибирь. Реалии” глава местного фонда возрождения исторического наследия. Там настаивают, что обряды поднимут боевой дух солдат p.dw.com/p/4K8of?maca=r…

The Armed Forces of Ukraine have now eliminated about 90,090 Russian troops in Ukraine from February 24 to December 2, which includes 650 over the earlier day by yourself.

DETROIT (AP) — Members of the United Auto Workers union appeared on Thursday to favor replacing many of their current leaders in an election that stemmed from a federal bribery and embezzlement scandal involving former union officials.

Reform-minded candidates, many part of the UAW Members United slate, are leading in multiple key races with just over 56% of the vote in. Many challengers campaigned on rescinding concessions made to companies in previous contract talks, including cost-of-living pay raises, elimination of a two-tier wage and benefit system, and other items.

That could raise costs for Detroit’s three automakers — General Motors, Ford and Stellantis — and almost inevitably will drive up already expensive auto prices.

With tallies from five of nine UAW regions counted, Shawn Fain, an international union official who started at a Stellantis plant in Kokomo, Indiana, was leading a five-candidate field in the race for president, the union’s top office.

Fain had 40.1% of the vote, while incumbent President Ray Curry was second with 36.3%. There likely will be a runoff election early next year between Fain and Curry since neither had a majority of the votes.

In the race for three vice presidents, Rich Boyer and Mike Booth, both Members United candidates, are first and second in an eight-candidate race, followed by union Vice President Chuck Browning. A runoff could happen there, too.

Margaret Mock, the Members United candidate for secretary-treasurer, had 63.9% of the vote to lead incumbent Frank Stuglin at 36.1%. Where tallies have been completed, candidates who campaigned on reforming the union also won three of nine regional director positions, with another heading to a runoff.

It wasn’t clear when the vote count would be finished. The ballots are being counted by a company hired by a court-appointed monitor who is overseeing the election and the union.

Fain led the Members United ticket, which campaigned on reforming the 372,000-member UAW after the scandal. The election also has broad implications for contract talks with the Detroit auto companies that start next year.

Fain has advocated for more of a confrontational stance and has accused union leadership of complacency. He has said the UAW has had a philosophy for 40 years of viewing automakers as partners rather than adversaries.

He hasn’t declared victory but said in an interview Thursday that the early vote totals are “a loud and clear message to the companies and the businesses to get ready, we’re coming for you.”

The automakers, he said, are making making the best profits in their history, yet are closing factories and costing union jobs. He gave General Motors’ 2019 closure of its Lordstown, Ohio, assembly plant as an example, plus a lack of new vehicles for Stellantis’ Belvidere, Illinois, plant, which he said has lost 3,000 workers.

At a candidates’ forum in September, Fain said union leaders should have reversed concessions made starting in 2007 and should have won job security guarantees.

“We’ve had at least 10 years with perfect conditions for regaining and improving what was lost during the Great Recession,” he said.

The contract talks come at a critical juncture for the union, which faces a transition from internal combustion vehicles to those that run on batteries. With fewer moving parts, fewer people will be needed to make electric vehicles, and jobs making engines and transmissions could be shifted to battery assembly plants that might not be unionized.

The election came after union members last December decided to directly vote on leaders for the first time instead of having them picked by delegates to a convention.

Under the old system, convention delegates were picked by local union offices. But the new slate of officers was selected by the current leadership, and there was rarely any serious opposition.

A company hired by Monitor Neil Barofsky mailed out about 1 million ballots to active and retired union members. But only 106,790, roughly 10.7%, were returned.

The voting happened after 11 union officials and a late official’s spouse pleaded guilty in the corruption probe since 2017, including the two former presidents, Gary Jones and Dennis Williams. Both were sentenced to prison.

To avoid a federal takeover, the union agreed to reforms and Barofsky’s appointment to oversee elections of the 13-member executive board.

Curry, appointed in 2021 to replace retiring Rory Gamble to lead the union, said he has put financial safeguards and reforms in place and has plans to bring union members “back into greater days.” He said at the candidates’ forum that the union also has plans to recruit new members.

“We don’t just make false demands and deliver false hopes,” he said.

KHERSON, Ukraine (AP) — In the liberated city of Kherson, Ukrainians have been tearing down a glaring symbol of occupation — billboards spreading Russian propaganda.

Throughout the southern city that was under Russian occupation for nearly nine months, the Russians had put up billboards declaring the city part of Russia or promoting important figures from their past.

This is part of a propaganda war that has been waged over Ukraine in tandem with the one being fought on the battlefield. Moscow has tried to spread its version of history and the ongoing war on social networks, but also in the territories of Ukraine under its control.

Some of the billboards in Kherson referred to World War II, but also to the Kremlin-orchestrated referendums that were held in four regions of Ukraine in September as a pretext for their unlawful annexation by Russia.

Kherson is located in one of the four regions, but Russia lost the city and the surrounding region to Ukraine in November in a major and humiliating defeat.

The city has since experienced power outages and repeated shelling while evidence of atrocities committed during the occupation have emerged. Ukrainian authorities have evacuated some citizens fearing they won’t be able to cope because of the damage inflicted on the infrastructure.

Amid the hardship and destruction, the Russian propaganda billboards have fueled anger and resentment. Not even renewed Russian shelling stopped community workers from removing the much-despised pro-Russian messages.

One Russia-installed billboard, for example, featured images of children wearing embroidered Ukrainian T-shirts, the traditional Vyshyvanka, with a digitally-added Russian tricolor flag and slogans like “Russia is here forever” or “Kherson is a Russian city.”

Other billboards had the image of Alexander Suvorov, the Russian Empire’s legendary 18th century general, and the caption: “Nature has created only one Russia; it has no rivals.”

Before Ukrainian authorities managed to take them down, some Russian billboards were written over with Ukrainian signs, such as the acronym for the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Gradually, the pro-Russian messages have been replaced by yellow and blue Ukrainian banners with very different lines: “Kherson, hero city” or “Dear, you are free.”

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Follow AP’s coverage of the War in Ukraine at: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — With Ukraine scrambling to keep communication lines open during the war, an army of engineers from the country’s phone companies has mobilized to help the public and policymakers stay in touch during repeated Russian missile and drone strikes.

The engineers, who typically go unseen and unsung in peacetime, often work around the clock to maintain or restore phone service, sometimes braving minefields to do so. After Russian strikes took out the electricity that cellphone towers usually run on, they revved up generators to keep the towers on.

“I know our guys — my colleagues — are very exhausted, but they’re motivated by the fact that we are doing an important thing,” Yuriy Dugnist, an engineer with Ukrainian telecommunications company Kyivstar, said after crunching through a half-foot (15 centimeters) of fresh snow to reach a fenced-in mobile phone tower on the western fringe of Kyiv, the capital.

Dugrist and his co-workers offered a glimpse of their new daily routines, which involve using an app on their own phones to monitor which of the scores of phone towers in the capital area were receiving electricity, either during breaks from the controlled blackouts being used to conserve energy or from the generators that kick in to provide backup power.

One entry ominously read, in English, “Low Fuel.”

Stopping off at a service station before their rounds, the team members filled up eight 20-liter (5.3 gallon) jerrycans with diesel fuel for a vast tank under a generator that relays power up a 50-meter (160-foot) cell tower in a suburban village that has had no electricity for days.

It’s one of many Ukrainian towns that have had intermittent power, or none at all, in the wake of multiple rounds of devastating Russian strikes in recent weeks targeting the country’s infrastructure — power plants in particular.

Kyivstar is the largest of Ukraine’s three main mobile phone companies, with some 26 million customers — or the equivalent of about two-thirds of the country’s population before Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion drove millions of people abroad, even if many have since returned.

The diesel generators were installed at the foot of the cell phone towers since long before the invasion, but they were rarely needed. Many Western countries have offered up similar generators and transformers to help Ukraine keep electricity running as well as possible after Russia’s blitz.

After emergency blackouts prompted by a round of Russian strikes on Nov. 23, Kyivstar deployed 15 teams of engineers simultaneously and called in “all our reserves” to troubleshoot the 2,500 mobile stations in their service area, Dugrist said.

He recalled rushing to the site of a destroyed cell tower when Russian forces pulled out of Irpin, a suburb northwest of Kyiv, earlier this year and getting there before Ukrainian minesweepers had arrived to give the all-clear signal.

The strain the war is putting on Ukraine’s mobile phone networks has reportedly driven up prices for satellite phone alternatives like Elon Musk’s Starlink system, which Ukraine’s military has used during the conflict, now in its 10th month.

After widespread infrastructure strikes last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy convened top officials to discuss the restoration work and supplies needed to safeguard the country’s energy and communication systems.

“Special attention is paid to the communication system,” he said, adding that no matter what the Russia has in mind, “we must maintain communication.”

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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

Russian troops hit a village in Zaporizhzhia district, destroying an administrative constructing.

SWEDESBORO, N.J. (AP) — A former coal-fired power plant in New Jersey will be imploded Friday, and its owners are expected to announce plans for a new clean energy venture on the site.

Starwood Energy will demolish the former Logan Generating Plant, with the head of New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities pushing the button that triggers explosives used in bringing the structure down.

Logan is one of two former coal-fired power plants that the company agreed in March to shut down. They were the last two coal-fired power plants operating in the state.

Environmental and public interest groups including the Sierra Club pushed Atlantic City Electric to end an agreement that locked rate-payers into what the Sierra Club termed above-market electricity rates, and to end the operation of the plants.

“The implosion will end a decades-long history of polluting air and worsening public health in the Swedesboro and surrounding Gloucester County communities,” the Sierra Club said in a statement.

The utility estimates that termination of the agreement will save ratepayers $30 million through 2024.

The other power plant shuttered under the agreement is the former Chambers Cogeneration Plant in Carneys Point.

The move comes as New Jersey is moving aggressively to adopt clean energy, including its push to be the East Coast leader in offshore wind energy.

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Follow Wayne Parry on Twitter at www.twitter.com/WayneParryAC

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — Below the vaulted dome and dark wood beams of a church in Colorado Springs, a gay men’s choir rehearsed for a concert that’s taken on new meaning after a LGBTQ night club became the site of a gruesome shooting that killed five and wounded 17.

“There is no peace on earth, I said,” the chorus sang. “For hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth.”

The old lyrics that rang through the halls of the First Congregational Church were haunted by new memories of the Nov. 21 violence at Club Q — the sound of screams over club music, the sight of bullet wounds plugged by napkins and people pleading with their friends to keep breathing.

In the 13 days since the shooting, Colorado Springs’ LGBTQ community has worked to collect itself and forge ahead. Patrons of Club Q — those who survived the rampage as well as regulars who weren’t there last Saturday — have organized donation drives for victims’ families, leaned on queer-affirming clergy and renewed their commitments to LGBTQ spaces and organizations, including Out Loud Colorado Springs Men’s Chorus.

Gay and lesbian choruses like Out Loud were borne out of the 1978 assassination of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and have remained steadfast pillars of the LGBTQ community from the AIDS crisis through mass shootings such as Orlando’s Pulse nightclub in 2016.

In Colorado Springs, members of Out Loud prepared for three sold-out concerts, their first performances since the COVID-19 pandemic forced them to cancel shows. The rehearsals brought laughter, and at times damp eyes, chins raised and heads defiantly held forward. They’re sending a clear message: “We are saying we are still here,” said Marius Nielsen, a transgender man who sung from the front row at a Wednesday night rehearsal.

In one practice session, Nielsen broke down while singing. He said he felt the swelling strength of those around him through the music.

“Everyone has you, even if you falter,” he said.

The concert’s solemn notes punctuated a largely joyful event where talented singers belted out Christmas carol medleys, some more campy than others. Members of the chorus dressed as the robed three kings — but in feathery, neon scarves — and struck go-go dancer poses. Another performer wearing Claus-style short shorts swooned over Santa.

“We will grieve, we will feel anger and sadness, and in the midst of that we will feel joy and hope,” said Bill Loper, the concert’s artistic director.

Standing three rows back from Nielsen, Rod Gilmore said the choir was keeping him going. With the violent memories still fresh, Club Q shooting survivor Gilmore said he would have reentered the closet he left last year at age 55 if it wasn’t for those standing next to him in the church.

“It’s given me solace and a comfortable feeling that relaxes me and makes me feel like I’m a whole of something, not just a part,” Gilmore said.

Colorado Springs residents are working to spread that feeling of togetherness throughout their city. Matthew Haynes, Club Q’s co-owner, is looking to remodel and install a garden and memorial to celebrate the lives lost. A friend cooked a vegan casserole for the owners. A Las Vegas resident drove to Colorado Springs to play a piano fastened to the bed of his red Toyota pickup.

“There’s no playbook for this,” said Haynes, who has started a GoFundMe page committed to “bringing Club Q back as the safe space for Colorado Springs.” His first goal is to ensure survivors and those mourning are supported.

At a memorial on Wednesday, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis paid his respects in front of a heaping row of flowers and gazed at photos of those lost. In 2018, Polis became the first openly gay man elected governor in the U.S.

A retired teacher who worked near Columbine High School during the 1999 mass shooting there dropped off flowers next to a stuffed pink flamingo and said he worried these tragedies have become so commonplace that people have become desensitized.

Amidst vigils, marches and outpourings of support on social media, Aaron Cornelius is among those in Colorado Springs demanding the tragedy be mourned and remembered.

“We are not going away,” Cornelius told a large audience Tuesday night at Lulu’s Downstairs, a bar just west of Colorado Springs that held a silent auction where poets, speakers and musicians performed. “This community is a lot stronger than they think. They think we are vulnerable; they think we are weak.”

On stage, they oscillated between fiery calls to action to fight the status quo and gentler messages advocating love over hate.

The faces of audience members were illuminated by candles as they chanted: “I am valid. I deserve to be safe. I may be afraid, but bravery is going out and living in the face of fear. I am brave. I am brave.”

During the auction, a self-described “later-in-life lesbian” pastor perused bespoke wine bottles labeled with Club Q and the date of the massacre, as well as gift cards for haircuts and a dog bandana reading, “I heart my Dads.”

Wyatt Kent, a drag queen who performed at Club Q the night of the shooting, read poems and anecdotes penned by their partner, Daniel Aston, who was killed while working behind the bar.

In one anecdote, Aston, who was a transgender man, wrote of moving to Colorado Springs from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and how he had grown into himself: “I’m less of a doormat, I’m more assertive, I have a job as a bartender that I love. I no longer want to die.”

Kent then read one of Aston’s poems, which Kent described as Aston helping the community move forward: “Some things never make any sense, like salmon downstream, like sweat rolling down your sleeve. That’s just the way these things go.”

“All of that is part of healing: the laughing, the crying, all of it. And then just being together. After something like this, you just naturally want a human to be with,” event organizer Kittie Kilner said.

That mixture of pride and rage, laughter and tears, is what Out Loud aims for in their upcoming holiday concerts.

“Music is magical,” chorus member Josh Campbell said. “We aren’t talking to each other, but … we connect on an emotional level.”

The small audience sensed that magic at rehearsal as the chorus progressed through “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” a carol based on a Civil War-era poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about his wounded son.

Their despair lifted as the music pulled toward resolution: “Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: God is not dead, nor doth he sleep. The wrong shall fail … the right prevail with peace on earth.”

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AP writer Sam Metz contributed from Salt Lake City. Jesse Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.