Kathy Whitworth, whose 88 LPGA Tour victories are the most ever by a player on a pro tour, passed away suddenly on Saturday while celebrating Christmas Eve with family and friends, her longtime partner Bettye Odle said. She was 83.

“It is with a heart full of love that we let everyone know of the passing of the winningest golf professional ever, Kathy Whitworth,” Odle said in a statement on Sunday.

“Kathy left this world the way she lived her life, loving, laughing and creating memories.”

The cause of death and location were not disclosed.

Raised in Jal, New Mexico, Whitworth first began playing golf at the age of 15 with her grandfather’s clubs and after winning titles as an amateur and attending Odessa College in Texas, turned pro at 19 and joined the LPGA Tour.

“I was really fortunate in that I knew what I wanted to do,” Whitworth said in a remembrance published on the LPGA Tour’s website.

“Golf just grabbed me by the throat. I can’t tell you how much I loved it. I used to think everyone knew what they wanted to do when they were 15 years old.”

Her mother and father supported her amid a sluggish start to her pro career and she won the first of her 88 LPGA Tour titles at the Kelly Girls Open in 1962.

“I’m glad when I look back on it that I didn’t succeed right away,” Whitworth said.

“When it happened, I was ready.”

She went on to claim six major championships, was named LPGA Tour’s Player of the Year seven times and became the first LPGA player to pass $1 million in career earnings. She claimed her final title at the United Virginia Bank Classic in 1985.

“Winning never got old,” Whitworth said.

Her career included a rivalry with fellow late World Golf Hall of Famer Mickey Wright, who is second behind Whitworth in LPGA Tour wins with 82. Tiger Woods and Sam Snead are tied for the most wins on the PGA Tour with 82.

Her contemporaries said Whitworth’s fiercely competitive nature is what set her apart.

“She just had to win,” Betsy Rawls, another one of Whitworth’s rivals, said on the LPGA website.

“A lot like Mickey Wright and Louise Suggs. There’s just something that drives them. Kathy was a very intelligent person. It was unacceptable for her to make a mistake.

“She hated herself when she made a mistake. She was wonderful to play with — sweet as she could be, nice to everybody — but oh, man, she berated herself something awful. And that’s what drove her.”

LPGA Commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan praised Whitworth’s impact both on and off the course.

“She inspired me as a young girl and now as the commissioner and I know she did the same for so many others,” Samaan said on the LPGA website.

“We all mourn with Bettye, her family and the entire golf world.”

Election-denying protesters camping outside Brazilian army bases have become “incubators of terrorism,” Brazil’s incoming justice minister said on Sunday, a day after police detonated an explosive device and arrested a suspect they accused of links to the Brasilia camp.

“Yesterday’s serious events in Brasilia prove that the so-called ‘patriotic’ camps have become incubators for terrorists,” tweeted Flavio Dino, the incoming minister. “There will be no amnesty for terrorists, their supporters and financiers.”

Supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro have been camped outside army bases in Brazil for weeks, urging the military to overturn the victory of leftist President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who takes office on Jan. 1.

Dino said arrangements for Lula’s inauguration would be “re-evaluated, with a view to tightening security.”

In a another tweet, Dino said he would propose the creation of “special groups to combat terrorism and irresponsible weaponry. The rule of law is not compatible with these political militias.”

News of the bomb added a new dimension to post-election violence in Brazil, where tensions remain high after the most fraught election in a generation.

Bolsonaro, who has yet to concede defeat, has made baseless claims about the credibility of Brazil’s voting system, and many of his hardcore supporters believe him. The head of Brazil’s electoral court last month rejected a complaint from Bolsonaro’s allies challenging the presidential election.

The Brasilia camp, outside the army headquarters, has become one of the country’s most extreme. On Dec. 12, the day Lula’s victory was certified, some of the camp dwellers attacked the federal police HQ in Brasilia.

Robson Cândido, head of the Civil Police in Brasilia, said a 54-year-old man from the northeastern state of Para had been arrested and confessed to planting the device in a fuel truck near the Brasilia airport in order to sow chaos.

“He came to participate in the protests, outside the army headquarters, and he’s part of that movement that supports the current president,” Candido told reporters. “They’re in that mission, which according to them is ideological, but which has got out of control.”

Police also found assault-style rifles and other explosives at an apartment rented by the man in Brasilia. Cândido said the suspect was a registered gun-owner, known as a CAC, a group that has swelled sixfold to nearly 700,000 people since Bolsonaro was elected in 2018 and began loosening gun laws.

Cândido said the man, and those helping him, had tried to activate the explosive device, but it had not gone off. He said it was still unclear how many other people were involved.

“We’ve never had bombs here in Brazil,” he said.

A deadly blizzard paralyzed Buffalo, New York, on Christmas Day, trapping motorists in their cars, knocking out electricity to thousands of homes and raising the death toll from a severe winter storm system that has 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 storm that roared out of the Great Lakes region late last week.

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.

Despite a ban imposed on driving 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 complicated by white-out conditions and drifting snow, Poloncarz said.

“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.

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

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

Christina Klaffka, a 39-year-old 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.”

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

Some 200 National Guard troops were mobilized in western New York, providing relief to police and fire crews, conducting wellness checks and bringing supplies to shelters, Hochul said.

The storm 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, 16% of residents had no electricity on Sunday, officials said.

In Canada, electricity was also out to at least 140,000 utility customers, mostly in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, hard hit by the same weather system that buried western New York in snow.

More than 1,700 flights in the United States were canceled as of midday Sunday, according to flight tracker FlightAware.

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.

The Buffalo airport had recorded nearly 4 feet of snow by Sunday, the Weather Service said. White-out conditions persisted south of Buffalo on Sunday afternoon, with snow falling at the rate of 2-3 inches 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 in both directions during a blizzard on Friday.

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

A Christmas Eve bus crash that police said was likely due to icy road conditions near Loon Lake in Canada’s British Columbia killed four people and left dozens hospitalized, authorities confirmed on Sunday.

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Experts warn of a critical Linux Kernel vulnerability (CVSS score of 10) impacting SMB servers that can lead to remote code execution.

A critical Linux kernel vulnerability (CVSS score of 10) exposes SMB servers with ksmbd enabled to hack. KSMBD is a Linux kernel server that implements SMB3 protocol in kernel space for sharing files over the network. An unauthenticated, remote attacker can execute arbitrary code on vulnerable installations of the Linux Kernel.

The flaw resides in the processing of SMB2_TREE_DISCONNECT commands.

“This vulnerability allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on affected installations of Linux Kernel. Authentication is not required to exploit this vulnerability, but only systems with ksmbd enabled are vulnerable.” reads the advisory published by ZDI. “The specific flaw exists within the processing of SMB2_TREE_DISCONNECT commands. The issue results from the lack of validating the existence of an object prior to performing operations on the object. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code in the context of the kernel.”

The vulnerability was discovered on July 26, 2022, by the researchers Arnaud Gatignol, Quentin Minster, Florent Saudel, Guillaume Teissier from the Thalium Team at Thales Group.

The flaw was publicly disclosed on December 22, 2022.

The researcher Shir Tamari, Head of Research at Wiz_IO, SMB servers using Samba are not affected, he also added that SMB servers using ksmbd are vulnerable to read access that could leak server’s memory (similar to the vulnerability Heartbleed).

“ksmbd is new; most users still use Samba and are not affected. Basically, if you are not running SMB servers with ksmbd, enjoy your weekend.” added Tamari.

Admins using ksmbd must update to Linux kernel version 5.15.61, which was released in August, or a newer version.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Linux)

The post Critical Linux Kernel flaw affects SMB servers with ksmbd enabled appeared first on Security Affairs.

It is always dark in the house of Mar-a-Lago. At least that is according to Trump’s advisors who claim that Trump’s world has been diminishing in real-time. “So, so small.” That is what’s being whispered behind Trump’s back. Sources close to him say he is “holed up” in Mar-a-lago, skipping activities such as rallies to sit in the artificial comfort in his inner sanctum.

But the would-be king is alone — always, always alone. “Sad. Lonely. Thirsty. And Broken.” Trump is a man without an anchor. According to these sources, he rarely leaves his home and is always defensive. “The magic is gone.” (What magic?)

A sad and woebegone picture of the emperor with no clothes is emerging. “He doesn’t have anything to do.” Trump wanders the halls of his home. His footsteps echo through corridors with few there to hear them. “He wants to be relevant.” The world has moved on — all except for Justice, who remains close, hovering over the head of the exiled traitor.

“His world is so, so small.” We know. And it is about to get smaller — which is no less than he deserves. “When Seb Gorka and Raheem Kassam and Kash Patel and Devin Nunes are your stars, that’s the D- list.”

Yes, but I’d go further. I’d say it’s the F List. “He is sensitive about his smallness.” He’d perhaps do well to get used to it. So yes, a picture has been painted of Donald’s life at Mar-a-lago. Unsurprisingly things are not looking great for Trump. And he brought it all on himself.

The post Donald Trump’s F-list appeared first on Palmer Report.

Moscow is ready to resume gas supplies to Europe through the Yamal-Europe Pipeline, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak told state TASS news agency.

“The European market remains relevant, as the gas shortage persists, and we have every opportunity to resume supplies,” TASS cited Novak as saying in remarks published by the agency on Sunday.

“For example, the Yamal-Europe Pipeline, which was stopped for political reasons, remains unused.”

The Yamal-Europe Pipeline usually flows westward, but has been mostly reversed since December of 2021 as Poland turned away from buying from Russia in favour of drawing on stored gas in Germany.

In May, Warsaw terminated its agreement with Russia, after earlier rejecting Moscow’s demand that it pays in roubles.

Russian supplier Gazprom (GAZP.MM) responded by cutting off supply and also said it would no longer be able to export gas via Poland after Moscow imposed sanctions against the firm that owns the Polish section of the Yamal-Europe pipeline.

Novak also reiterated that Moscow is discussing additional gas supplies through Turkey after a creation of a hub there.

He also said that Moscow expects it will have shipped 21 billion cubic metres (bcm) of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe in 2022.

“This year we were able to significantly increase LNG supplies to Europe,” Novak said. “In the 11 months of 2022 they increased to 19.4 bcm, by the end of the year 21 bcm are expected.”

MOSCOW (Reuters) -President Vladimir Putin said Russia was open to negotiations over the war in Ukraine and blamed Kyiv and its Western backers for a lack of talks, a stance Washington has previously dismissed as posturing amid persistent Russian attacks.

“We are ready to negotiate with everyone involved about acceptable solutions, but that is up to them – we are not the ones refusing to negotiate, they are,” Putin told Rossiya 1 state television in an interview broadcast on Sunday.

An adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Putin needed to return to reality and acknowledge it was Russia which did not want talks.

“Russia single-handedly attacked Ukraine and is killing citizens,” the adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, tweeted. “Russia doesn’t want negotiations, but tries to avoid responsibility.”

Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine has triggered the deadliest European conflict since World War Two and the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

There is, thus far, little end in sight to the war.

The Kremlin says it will fight until all its aims are achieved while Kyiv says it will not rest until every Russian soldier is ejected from all of its territory.

Putin has said in the past that Russia is open to negotiations but has made clear it must be on his terms, which would involve Ukraine bowing to Moscow’s demands and accepting Russia’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions. Kyiv, backed by the West, has made clear that is unacceptable.

The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment but in October, when Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov voiced an openness to talks, department spokesperson Ned Price told a regular news briefing:

“We see this as posturing. We do not see this as a constructive, legitimate offer to engage in the dialogue and diplomacy that is absolutely necessary to see an end to this brutal war of aggression.”

‘NO OTHER CHOICE’

Russian attacks on power stations have left millions without electricity, and Zelenskiy said Moscow would aim to make the last few days of 2022 dark and difficult.

“Russia has lost everything it could this year. … I know darkness will not prevent us from leading the occupiers to new defeats. But we have to be ready for any scenario,” he said in an evening video address.

The Ukrainian armed forces’ general staff said there was still a threat of air and missile strikes on critical infrastructure across the country.

Russian troops had shelled dozens of towns and positions along the front line, it said in a Facebook post.

Zelenskiy, referring to a strike on the southern city of Kherson on Saturday that officials say killed at least 10 people, vowed, “We will find every Russian murderer”.

Putin accused the West of trying to cleave Russia apart.

“I believe that we are acting in the right direction, we are defending our national interests, the interests of our citizens, our people. And we have no other choice but to protect our citizens,” Putin said.

Asked if the geopolitical conflict with the West was approaching a dangerous level, Putin said: “I don’t think it’s so dangerous.”

Kyiv and the West say Putin has no justification for what they cast as an imperial-style war of occupation.

(Reuters) -Thousands of residents were without power near Tacoma, Washington, after three electrical substations were vandalized, local authorities said on Sunday, adding that it was not yet clear if the Christmas Day incidents were linked.

The Pierce County Sheriff’s Department said robberies were reported at two substations belonging to Tacoma Public Utilities and another belonging to Puget Sound Energy. Deputies cited forced entry into the fenced-in area, with equipment vandalized but nothing taken from the sites, it said. More than 14,000 customers were affected.

“At this time deputies are conducting the initial investigation. We do not have any suspects in custody. It is unknown if there are any motives or if this was a coordinated attack on the power systems,” the department said in a statement on its website.

Earlier this month, a utility in North Carolina reported outages from what local authorities said were orchestrated shootings now being investigated by federal law enforcement.

The FBI has also been investigating shots fired near a power facility in South Carolina days later, and whether those two incidents could be related, NBC News and other local media have reported.

Utilities nationwide have been strained by a severe cold weather system that swept across the country this week, leaving more than 300,000 without power from the winter storm.

In east Piece County, about 2,700 people serviced by Tacoma Public Utilities remained affected midday on Sunday after an initial 7,300 residents lost power in the area, about 45 miles (72 km) south of Seattle, Tacoma Public Utilities said in a post on Twitter.

“We are working as quickly and safely as possible to restore power,” it said, noting that its substations “were attacked” earlier on Sunday morning and that the incidents were reported to police.

Representatives for Puget Sound Energy could not be immediately reached for comment.

Millions of people hunkered down against a deep freeze Sunday morning to ride out the frigid storm that has killed at least 24 people across the United States and is expected to claim more lives after trapping some residents inside houses with heaping snow drifts and knocking out power to several hundred thousand homes and businesses.

The scope of the storm has been nearly unprecedented, stretching from the Great Lakes near Canada to the Rio Grande along the border with Mexico. About 60% of the U.S. population faced some sort of winter weather advisory or warning, and temperatures plummeted drastically below normal from east of the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians, the National Weather Service said.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Some 1,346 domestic and international flights were canceled as of early Sunday, according to the tracking site FlightAware.

Forecasters said a bomb cyclone — when atmospheric pressure drops very quickly in a strong storm — had developed near the Great Lakes, stirring up blizzard conditions, including heavy winds and snow.

The storm unleashed its full fury on Buffalo, with hurricane-force winds and snow causing whiteout conditions, paralyzing emergency response efforts — New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said almost every fire truck in the city was stranded Saturday — and shutting down the airport through Monday, according to officials. The National Weather Service said the snow total at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport stood at 43 inches (109 centimeters) at 7 a.m. Sunday.

Daylight Sunday revealed cars nearly covered by 6-foot snowdrifts and thousands of houses, some adorned in unlit holiday displays, dark from a lack of power. With snow swirling down untouched and impassable streets, forecasters warned that an additional 1 to 2 feet of snow was possible in some areas through early Monday morning amid wind gusts of 40 mph.

Two people died in their suburban Cheektowaga, New York, homes Friday when emergency crews could not reach them in time to treat their medical conditions, and another died in Buffalo. Four more deaths were confirmed overnight, bringing the total to seven in Erie County, where County Executive Mark Poloncarz warned there may be more dead.

“Some were found in cars, some were found on the street in snowbanks,” said Poloncarz. “We know there are people who have been stuck in cars for more than 2 days.”

Freezing conditions and day-old power outages had Buffalonians scrambling to get out of their homes to anywhere that had heat amid what New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called the longest sustained blizzard conditions ever in the city. But with streets under a thick blanket of white, that wasn’t an option for people like Jeremy Manahan, who charged his phone in his parked car after almost 29 hours without electricity.

“There’s one warming shelter, but that would be too far for me to get to. I can’t drive, obviously, because I’m stuck,” Manahan said. “And you can’t be outside for more than 10 minutes without getting frostbit.”

Ditjak Ilunga of Gaithersburg, Maryland, was on his way to visit relatives in Hamilton, Ontario, for Christmas with his daughters Friday when their SUV was trapped in Buffalo. Unable to get help, they spent hours with the engine running in the vehicle buffeted by wind and nearly buried in snow.

By 4 a.m. Saturday, with their fuel nearly gone, Ilunga made a desperate choice to risk the howling storm to reach a nearby shelter. He carried 6-year-old Destiny on his back while 16-year-old Cindy clutched their Pomeranian puppy, stepping into his footprints as they trudged through drifts.

“If I stay in this car I’m going to die here with my kids,” he recalled thinking, but believing they had to try. He cried when the family walked through the shelter doors. “It’s something I will never forget in my life.”

The storm knocked out power in communities from Maine to Seattle. But heat and lights were steadily being restored across the U.S. According to poweroutage.us, less than 300,000 customers were without power at 8 a.m. EDT Sunday – down from a peak of 1.7 million. In North Carolina, less than 6,600 customers had no power – down from a peak of 485,000 or more.

Concerns about the need for rolling blackouts across eastern states subsided Sunday after PJM Interconnection, the mid-Atlantic grid operator, said its utilities could meet the day’s peak electricity usage. PJM had called Saturday for the 65 million consumers in its territory to conserve electricity because of struggles by some power plants to operate amid frigid temperatures.

Across the six New England states, about 121,300 customers remained without power on Sunday, with Maine still the hardest hit.

In New York, more than 39,000 households were still without power Sunday , including 27,000 in Erie County, as crews battled high winds and found substations damaged. Hochul said that even the National Guard, which now has 200 people on the ground and another 200 expected by Monday, struggled with getting stuck in the snow.

Storm-related deaths were reported in recent days all over the country: seven in Erie County, New York; 10 dead in multiple crashes in Ohio, including a pileup involving some 50 vehicles, a man whose sport utility vehicle ran into a snowplow and an electrocuted utility worker; four motorists killed in separate crashes in Missouri and Kansas; a Vermont woman struck by a falling branch; an apparently homeless man found amid Colorado’s subzero temperatures; a woman who fell through Wisconsin river ice.

In Florida, the thermometer plunged below freezing for the first time in almost five years at Tampa International Airport, and hit 43 degrees (6.1 degrees Celsius) in West Palm Beach, according to the National Weather Service. The temperature drop and freezing sleet was conducive to iguanas falling out of trees since the cold-blooded reptiles typically become immobilized in unusually cold weather.

Along Interstate 71 in Kentucky, Terry Henderson and her husband, Rick, weathered a 34-hour traffic jam in a rig outfitted with a diesel heater, a toilet and a refrigerator after getting stuck trying to drive from Alabama to their Ohio home for Christmas.

“We should have stayed,” Terry Henderson said after they got moving again Saturday.

In Buffalo, William Kless was up at 3 a.m. Sunday He called his 8-, 9- and 12-year-old children at their mother’s house to wish them Merry Christmas and then headed off on his snowmobile for a second day spent shuttling people from stuck cars and frigid homes to a church operating as a warming shelter.

Through heavy, wind-driven snow, he brought about 15 people to the church in Buffalo Saturday, he said, including a family of five transported one-by-one. He also got a man in need of dialysis, who had spent 17 hours stranded in his car, back home, where he could receive treatment.

“I just felt like I had to,” Kless said