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Kyiv’s mayor told residents on Thursday to stock up on water, food and warm clothes in case of a total blackout caused by Russian air strikes, and said residents should consider staying with friends in the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital if they could.

Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko warned that the temperature in homes could drop rapidly in the event of “a blackout and the destruction of infrastructure and a total absence of electricity, water supply, drainage and heat supply”.

“The temperature in the apartments may not differ much from the outside temperature,” the former boxing champion told a security forum in Kyiv, where temperatures are around -4 degrees Celsius (25 degrees Fahrenheit).

“I appeal to the people … to have a supply of technical water, drinking water, durable food products, warm clothing.”

The war has entered a relentless new phase with the onset of the first winter since Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine.

Klitschko also said that if there were no heat or water for between 12 and 14 hours at a temperature of -5 Celsius, the city would have to drain water from residential heating systems to prevent permanent damage.

“We would not be able to restore this system till spring and it would be a big challenge,” he said.

Power units at several power stations across Ukraine had to conduct emergency shutdowns this week after a spate of Russian missile strikes.

Klitschko said people should consider temporarily moving to stay with friends or relatives who own houses on the outskirts of Kyiv.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said Ukraine still had a 30% deficit of electricity, six days after the last big wave of Russian missile strikes on its power grid.

To remedy the lack of heating and electricity, Kyiv authorities set up 430 heating points where people can warm up and recharge their phones, but Klitschko said that the number was insufficient for a city of 3.5 million people.

“Not even 500 would help, even 5,000 would be too little.”

Russia says its attacks on vital infrastructure are militarily legitimate, and that Kyiv can end the suffering of its people if it yields to Russian demands, which Moscow has not spelled out. Ukraine says attacks intended to cause civilian misery are a war crime.

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Ukraine’s military said Russia had pulled some troops from towns on the opposite bank of the Dnipro River from Kherson city, the first official Ukrainian report of a Russian withdrawal on what is now the main front line in the south..

* Spain has stepped up security at public and diplomatic buildings after a spate of letter bombs, including one sent to Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and another to the Ukrainian embassy in Madrid, where an official suffered minor injuries.

* Air raid alerts were issued across all of Ukraine following warnings by Ukrainian officials that Russia was preparing a new wave of missile and drone strikes. “An overall air raid alert is in place in Ukraine. Go to shelters,” country’s border service wrote on Telegram messaging app.

* Ukraine’s military said it had found fragments of Russian-fired nuclear-capable missiles with dud warheads in west Ukraine, and that their apparent purpose was to distract air defences.

* The recently liberated Ukrainian city of Kherson has lost its power supply after heavy shelling by Russian forces, the regional governor said.

* European Union governments tentatively agreed on a $60 a barrel price cap on Russian seaborne oil, with an adjustment mechanism to keep the cap at 5% below the market price, an EU diplomat said.

* Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on that big problems had accumulated in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), accusing the West of spurning the chance to make it a real bridge with Russia after the Cold War.

* Lavrov said that discussions with Washington about potential prisoner exchanges were being conducted by the two countries’ intelligence services, and that he hoped they would be successful.

* The European Union needs patience as it sanctions Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, as most measures will only have an impact in the medium and long term, Lithuania’s prime minister said in an interview at  the  Reuters NEXT conference.

* Switzerland has frozen financial assets worth 7.5 billion Swiss francs ($7.94 billion) as of Nov. 25 under sanctions against Russians to punish Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine, the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) said.

* Russia said the German parliament’s move to recognise the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine as a Soviet-imposed genocide was an anti-Russian provocation and an attempt by Germany to whitewash its Nazi past.

* Ukraine sacked a top engineer at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, accusing him of collaborating with Russian forces, and urged other Ukrainian staff at the plant to remain loyal to Kyiv.

* Russia must withdraw its heavy weapons and military personnel from the Zaporizhzhia plant if the U.N. atomic watchdog’s efforts to create a protection zone are to succeed, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said.

* In a grim sign of the energy crisis caused by Russian attacks on Ukraine’s electricity grid, nine people have been killed in fires over the past 24 hours as Ukrainians resorted to emergency generators, candles and gas cylinders in violation of safety rules to try to heat their homes after power outages.

* “Remember one thing – the Russians are afraid. And they are very cold and no one will help them, because they do not have popular support,” – Andriy Yermak, chief of Ukrainian presidential staff.

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U.S. President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron renewed their commitment to fighting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Thursday in a White House meeting where the allies also acknowledged tensions over handling the economic stress of the war.

Biden is hosting Macron at the first state visit since the U.S. leader took office in early 2021. Biden and his wife Jill greeted Macron and his wife Brigitte with hugs, kisses and broad smiles as they celebrated more than 200 years of U.S.-French relations.

In a joint statement issued after their Oval Office talks, the two leaders said they were committed to holding Russia to account “for widely documented atrocities and war crimes, committed both by its regular armed forces and by its proxies” in Ukraine.

They vowed to coordinate on their concerns regarding “China’s challenge to the rules-based international order, including respect for human rights and to work together with China on important global issues like climate change.”

Biden welcomed France as “our oldest ally, our unwavering partner in freedom’s cause” at the arrival ceremony on the South Lawn. Both leaders celebrated their countries’ alliance against Russian President Putin and as defenders of democracy.

“France and the United States are facing down Vladimir Putin’s grasping ambition for conquest” and “defending the democratic values and universal human rights which are the heart of both our nations,” Biden said.

“It doesn’t mean that every single solitary thing we agree on,” he said. “But it does mean we agree on almost everything.”

Macron said the two nations had a shared responsibility to protect democracies on both sides of the ocean and face the direct and indirect consequences of the war in Ukraine together.

“A carbon-neutral economy, creating a lot of jobs, which means investing a lot in our economies, and we have to synchronize our actions on this issue,” he said.

The Macrons arrived in Washington on Tuesday for his second state visit to the United States since taking office in 2017.

Biden, 80, and Macron, 44, have had many meetings at international gatherings but this will be the most amount of time they have spent together. A glittering state dinner was planned, with 200 Maine lobsters flown in for the occasion.

The men smiled as they shared asides and appeared at ease with each other before their talks.

Macron was expected to raise French and European concerns about subsidies in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a $430 billion bill that offers massive subsidies for U.S.-made products and is aimed at addressing the climate crisis.

European leaders say the legislative package signed by Biden in August is unfair to non-American companies and would be a serious blow to their economies as Europe deals with the fallout from Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine.

At a meeting on Wednesday with U.S. lawmakers, Macron said the act was “super aggressive” toward European companies, one participant told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Macron told the French community in Washington that the cost of the war in Ukraine was much higher in Europe than in the United States and that Europe risked falling behind if the subsidies siphoned new investments. This could “fragment the West,” he said.

There was no sign that Biden was prepared to make concessions.

White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said the legislation “presents significant opportunities for European firms as well as benefits to EU energy security” when asked about European concerns.

Both leaders have sought to bolster support for the Ukrainian military.

NATO ministers met in Bucharest and pledged more aid to Ukraine to help against Russia’s attacks on energy infrastructure as winter bites.

The alliance, of which the United States and France are founding members, was also discussing how to address challenges posed by China’s military buildup and its cooperation with Russia, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said. Macron has said in the past that China should not be a focus for NATO.

The two leaders and their wives, who dined together informally on Wednesday, took part in a South Lawn arrival ceremony that featured a military honor guard, a red-jacketed colonial band with the Fife and Drum Corps and national anthems.

Among the gifts Macron brought was a vinyl and CD version of the original soundtrack of Claude Lelouch’s 1966 film “Un Homme et une Femme,” the film the Bidens went to see on their first date, according to the Elysee Palace.

The Bidens presented Macron with a custom mirror made of fallen wood from the White House grounds and a custom vinyl record collection of great American musicians.

The formal dinner in a pavilion on the White House South Lawn will feature music from Jon Batiste, Chardonnay from the Napa Valley and cheeses from Oregon, California and Wisconsin.

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A business executive in Luxembourg behind a successful effort to roll back corporate transparency in Europe owned companies in high-profile tax havens, leaked documents show.

Patrick Hansen, 50, was one of two plaintiffs who last week persuaded the highest court in Europe to rule that making public the names of company owners violates personal privacy and the right to the protection of personal data.

The offshore companies of Patrick Hansen, a plaintiff in a lawsuit that challenged Luxembourg’s public company ownership registry, appear in the Pandora Papers.

Records from the 2021 Pandora Papers investigation show Hansen owned a holding company in the British Virgin Islands with activities in Luxembourg, Cyprus and Russia and assets valued at more than $3 million. Hansen also co-owned a company registered in the Central American tax haven of Belize, records show.

The Nov. 22 ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union struck down a 2018 requirement that member states establish and publish databases of company owners. In recent years, those databases have allowed journalists, lawyers and members of the public to better identify whose money is flowing into shell companies and other vehicles for corporate secrecy.

Transparency advocates, many of whom have long pressed governments to adopt public registries, immediately criticized the ruling.

“Access to beneficial ownership data is vital to identifying – and stopping – corruption and dirty money,” Maíra Martini, an anti-corruption expert at Transparency International, said in a statement. “The court’s decision takes us back years.”

Following the ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria and Belgium announced suspensions to websites that had hours earlier allowed members of the public to identify the owners of companies registered in those countries.

The transparency rollback across Europe came even as other regions have embraced public databases of company owners. Governments in Latin America, Africa and Asia have in recent years introduced ownership registries, in some cases citing revelations from  investigations into offshore finance by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

“The European Court of Justice’s decision ignores all the lessons learned over the past decade from leaks like the Pandora Papers and Panama Papers,” Moran Harari, a senior researcher at Tax Justice Network, said in a statement, calling on governments to open a hearing on the judgment.

Lawsuit challenged transparency reforms in tax haven

The court issued the decision following a lawsuit brought by Sovim S.A. and an individual who went by the initials W.M. Luxembourg media subsequently identified W.M. as Patrick Hansen, chief executive of private jet company, Luxaviation. Hansen co-founded the company in 2008 alongside Nicolay Bogachev, a former Soviet KGB officer, according to media reports. Bogachev is no longer involved with the company.

As part of the lawsuit in Europe, Hansen and Sovim S.A. successfully argued that Luxembourg’s public registry, established following a European Union requirement for member states to grant public access to company ownership information, exposed company owners to risks of “fraud, kidnapping, blackmail, extortion, harassment, violence or intimidation.”

The British Virgin Islands and Belize have for years been criticized for their lack of transparency by anti-corruption campaigners, tax inspectors and law enforcement officials.

Hansen did not respond to requests for comment.

Filippo Noseda, an attorney who helped lead the case against the public registry, said in a statement after the ruling that the judgment “represents a victory for data protection and the Rule of Law in an extremely politicized context.”

Noseda’s firm, Mischon de Reya, has previously represented clients with a long track record of corporate secrecy, including Dan Gertler, an Israeli businessman sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for his alleged involvement in corruption.

Luxembourg, a tiny tax haven in the heart of Europe, has long played an outsized role in corporate secrecy.

In 2014, ICIJ and media partners revealed that Luxembourg had signed secretive deals that allowed multinational corporations to slash tax bills. Two years later, as part of the Panama Papers investigation, reporters revealed secretive offshore wealth and deals of politicians around the world, including in Luxembourg.

“Public access to beneficial ownership information can lead to more investigations by public authorities,” Transparency International said in a recent brief submitted to the same European court as part of a separate lawsuit, citing the Panama Papers investigation.

Governments have used revelations from the Panama Papers to identify and prosecute citizens who owned secretive companies, recouping  more than $1.36 billion in unpaid taxes, fines and other penalties as of 2021.

The Biden administration’s most infamous “genderfluid” official isn’t letting a pesky felony charge get in the way of a good time.

Sam Brinton, who was placed on leave at the Department of Energy after stealing a suitcase full of women’s clothes, last weekend delivered a seminar on the science of spanking and “turning butts red” at a Los Angeles kink conference. Speaking under the pseudonym “NuclearNerd,” Brinton delivered the hands-on “Spanking: From Calculus To Chemistry” seminar at the Leather Getaway conference, the Daily Mail reported.

“Taught by NuclearNerd, a nerd with graduate degrees from MIT in nuclear engineering with a sincere passion in turning butts red, this class will demonstrate a variety of physics principles with live demonstrations,” an online advertisement for Brinton’s seminar states. “Oh, and if you stick around, you’ll get the physics version of the class where you can hear about Sam’s original calculation of the spring force coefficient of a butt being spanked!”

Brinton, who was named deputy assistant secretary of the Office of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition at the Department of Energy in June, knows a thing or two about spanking. The federal official gets reps in at regular “kink parties” Brinton hosts in their Washington, D.C., “dungeon,” according to the bureaucrat’s presenter bio on the conference’s website.

“As a graduate of MIT, NuclearNerd has been teaching their ‘Physics of Kink’ class in universities and community events across the country for years,” the bio states. “They have been active in the kink world since 2013, host monthly kink parties in their dungeon in Washington, DC, and estimate they have spanked over 2,000 cute butts.”

Brinton uses the same NuclearNerd pseudonym for an active profile on the fetish hookup app Recon, according to the Daily Mail. On Oct. 27, the bureaucrat was charged with felony theft for swiping a Vera Bradley suitcase, which with its contents was worth $2,325, from the Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport.

Other seminars taught at the leather kink conference included: “Heavy Metal Torture,” “Fisting Fundamentals,” “Cowboy Rope Bondage,” “Running a Dungeon 101,” “Pushing Limits: Managing Fear and Hesitation,” “Ball Stretching 101,” and “Advanced Flogging.”

Brinton faces up to five years in prison if convicted of felony theft. A hearing for Brinton’s case is scheduled to take place in Minneapolis on Dec. 19.

The post Slap Happy: Thieving Nonbinary Biden Official Leads Spanking Seminar at Sex Conference appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Democratic Maine congressman Jared Golden is attacking President Joe Biden for approving onerous regulations that put Maine lobstermen “out of business.”

The White House on Tuesday had 200 live lobsters shipped from Maine to Washington, D.C., for a Thursday State Dinner, prompting Golden’s ire.

“If the Biden White House can prioritize purchasing 200 Maine lobsters for a fancy dinner,” Golden tweeted from his official account, then the president “should also take the time to meet with the Maine lobstermen his administration is currently regulating out of business.”

The “fancy dinner” Golden mentioned is in honor of French president Emmanuel Macron.

A 2021 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) regulation intended to protect the North Atlantic right whale would “shut down Maine’s lobster fishery by 2030,” sounding “a death knell for our nation’s lobster industry,” Golden and other Maine lawmakers wrote last year to Biden. The rule would also not protect the whales, the lawmakers wrote, noting that since 2002, Maine lobstering has not caused “a single right whale serious injury or mortality.”

Golden, a Marine veteran, is widely considered a moderate, being one of only two House Democrats to vote against Biden’s American Rescue Act, which many economists say hiked inflation. Golden has also condemned Biden’s student debt cancellation scheme as “out of touch.”

The Maine congressman’s moderation only goes so far, however. Despite his criticism of the lobstering regulation, Golden voted for Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which directs $6.27 billion to NOAA, the agency that passed the regulation. He votes with Biden’s position 87.5 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight.

The post Maine’s Dem Congressman Takes Shot at Biden Over Lobsters appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

By Ross Kerber

(Reuters)—Florida’s Chief Financial Officer said on Thursday his department would pull $2 billion worth of its assets managed by BlackRock Inc, the biggest such divestment by a state opposed to the asset manager’s environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) policies.

While the move will hardly dent BlackRock’s $8 trillion in assets, it underscores how the backlash among many Republican politicians, such as those in Florida, against ESG investing, which they see as promoting a “woke agenda,” is gathering steam.

Republicans are set to assume control of the House of Representatives in January. This will allow them to hold hearings on ESG and grill the chief executives of BlackRock and other major assets managers about their ESG policies, and also pressure regulators to scrutinize them.

In a statement, Florida CFO Jimmy Patronis said the state’s Treasury, which he oversees, would remove BlackRock as manager of about $600 million of short-term investments and have its custodian freeze $1.43 billion of long-term securities now with BlackRock, with an eye on reallocating the money to other money managers by the start of 2023.

Patronis accused BlackRock of focusing on ESG rather than higher returns for investors.

“Florida’s Treasury Division is divesting from BlackRock because they have openly stated they’ve got other goals than producing returns,” Patronis said in the statement provided by his office.

A BlackRock representative did not immediately comment.

While BlackRock has encouraged portfolio companies to take steps like disclosing more data about their carbon emissions or to add more diverse board members, it has said its efforts are aimed at improving company performance and resisted calls for steps like divesting from oil companies. U.S. Democratic officials have argued BlackRock doesn’t press ESG concerns enough.[L4N30T3PB]

So far, only Republican-controlled states have made major reallocations away from BlackRock, including $794 million pulled by Louisiana’s treasurer [L4N3162LQ] and $500 million by Missouri’s treasurer, both in October.

Earlier this week, Republican attorneys general from various states asked a federal regulator to limit Vanguard Group Inc’s activities over ESG concerns, and asked United Parcel Service Inc and FedEx Corp to clarify their policies on tracking firearms shipments.

(Reporting by Ross Kerber in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

The post Florida Pulls $2 Billion From BlackRock in Largest Anti-ESG Divestment appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Nicole Mann was busy growing dwarf tomatoes aboard the International Space Station (ISS) this morning just before I reached her by phone, in a call patched from New York through Mission Control in Houston, Texas, and up to the station, orbiting 400 km (250 mi.) above the Earth. Dwarf tomatoes are no minor thing for a station program preparing human beings for long-term stays on the moon and later Mars, where they will have to learn to live off the land—which includes growing their own food.

“I was testing out the different light sources and different fertilizers to see how that affects the growth of the tomatoes,” Mann told me. “In order to test them, we will get to taste the tomatoes when they are grown too.”

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Horticulture is only one part of the some 200 experiments Mann, 45, will be conducting during her 6-month stay aboard the station—a stay that began with her launch with three other crewmembers aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft in October. It was the sixth time a Dragon has carried astronauts to the ISS—but with Mann on board, the flight stood apart. Not only was she the first woman to command a Crew Dragon, she also became the first Native American woman in space—a member of the Wailacki of the Round Valley Indian Tribes of Covelo, Calif.

“To be honest,” she says, “it makes me feel very proud. I think of the generations that came before me and the obstacles and challenges that people had to overcome. They helped pave the way for my path and opened up a lot of opportunities for me.”

Mann’s route to NASA and space was a long and glittery one. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and then Stanford University, where she earned a Master of Science in mechanical engineering, she is also an active duty Marine Colonel, who flew 47 combat missions in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. She later worked as a test pilot for the F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet—the Navy’s newest and most advanced carrier-based strike aircraft—and has logged more than 2,500 hours in 25 different types of aircraft. That exhaustive training in aircraft helped prepare her for the even trickier business of flying spacecraft, especially the Dragon.

“Flying Hornets teaches you compartmentalization, and that is huge,” she says. “When you’re flying spacecraft it’s huge too. Sometimes you’re doing things that are time critical, that have dire consequences if things don’t go properly. So you really need to be able to focus on precisely what you’re doing and execute your goal.”

Aboard the station, things are less urgent since, while the ISS requires regular upkeep and maintenance and occasional reboosts of its orbit, it essentially flies itself in an ever-continuing path around the globe. That gives the crewmembers plenty of time for the work they have to do—and at least a little time for sightseeing and reflection. There are seven people currently aboard the station including Mann: three American astronauts; one astronaut from JAXA, the Japanese space agency; and three Russian cosmonauts. All is peaceable and collegial among the seven, but they are not blind to the fact that 400 km below, the U.S. and Russia are at geopolitical dagger points over the war in Ukraine. From space, however, none of that is visible, and it makes for a certain transcendence that astronauts have come to dub “the overview effect.”

“You look out the windows and take a quick glance,” Mann says, “and at first it looks just like what you’ve seen in pictures and movies. But if you pause and live in the moment a bit, you can take the time to appreciate the planet moving by at remarkable speed. You see weather changing; you can see what I used to think of as distant lands pass under you in a matter of minutes.”

“It really gives you a perspective of how small and fragile our planet is and just how united we are on this one little globe,” she continues. “I hope that that perspective can be shared with more people throughout the world and maybe that’s something that will help unite us as a human race.”

The Earth isn’t the only globe that’s on Mann’s mind as she serves out her station tour. Even as the ISS crew tend to their daily responsibilities, Artemis 1, the uncrewed Orion capsule that will one day return humans to the moon, is midway through its mission in lunar orbit, beaming back images of the close-up moon and the distant Earth 400,000 km (250,000 mi.) away. Those pictures are being shared not just with the 7.8 billion people on the planet, but the seven aboard the station, and that has Mann thinking about the future.

Asked if she sees herself as a possible future member of the Artemis team, she responds with a straightforward, “Absolutely,” adding, “I think everybody at NASA is excited to be a part of the Artemis program. Here on the station, we upload the photographs and it’s really exciting, it really invigorates. And this is just the beginning. The moon is a stepping stone for our exploration of Mars.”

But the moon and Mars are for later. For now, Mann has more than four months ahead in her current cosmic assignment—and she is mindful that every day she spends aloft carries a symbolic responsibility with it. Among the personal effects she brought with her on the mission is a traditional Native American dream catcher her mother gave her when she was a child—a reminder of her path-setting cultural status. She is also aware that even now, more than 60 years after humans began flying in space, women represent just 12% of all of the astronauts and cosmonauts who have ever left the planet. Her goal, as a woman and an Indigenous American, is to help others like her follow her.

“I hope that young women can connect with me and my journey,” she says, “and maybe see a little bit of themselves in me. Maybe that will give them the inspiration and the courage that they need to follow their dreams.”