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The post Russian army launches 26 strikes on Sumy region on Feb 4 appeared first on Ukraine Intelligence.

U.S. President Joe Biden will visit Poland, the Polish president’s foreign policy adviser said on Saturday.

“We already know for sure that President Joe Biden will respond positively to President Duda’s invitation and will come to Poland,” Marcin Przydacz said on public TV.

“We have agreed with the American side that we will announce the date of this visit in due course, but I can assure that it will be sooner rather than later,” he added.

Przydacz said that preparations are underway for the visit which “meets the expectations of both the White House and the expectations of the Polish side”.

“But for us it will be very important and crucial to continue supporting Poland’s security …,” he added.

President Biden said on Monday that he would visit Poland but did not know when.

The Ukrainian port city of Odesa on Saturday restored power to critical infrastructure after a fire broke out at an overloaded substation, leaving nearly 500,000 people without electricity, a top official said.

The blaze, which erupted earlier in the day, is a new blow to the country’s ailing energy grid that has been hammered by Russian strikes for months.

Officials said repairs could take weeks. The government said it would appeal to Turkey for help.

“Power to all critical infrastructure has been restored. The city will therefore have water and heat,” Ukraine Energy Minister German Galushchenko wrote on Facebook late in the day.

“About a third of the city’s consumers now have lighting,” he said, without giving precise details, adding that 31 high-power generators were on their way to the city.

The CEO of the state grid operator, Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, earlier said critical equipment that had already been damaged several times by Russian missile strikes burst into flames when it could no longer “withstand the load”.

He told a briefing that any further Russian missile or drone attacks could make matters even worse.

Since October, Moscow has waged a campaign of massive missile attacks on energy infrastructure. Moscow says the strikes aim to reduce Ukraine’s ability to fight; Kyiv says they have no military purpose and are intended to hurt civilians.

“The situation is difficult, the scale of the accident is significant, it is impossible to quickly restore power supply,” Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal wrote on Telegram.

Odesa regional governor Maksym Marchenko said practically all of the city had lost power after the incident, and that as of Saturday afternoon about 500,000 people faced outages.

That represents about half of Odesa’s pre-war population of one million, when it was Ukraine’s third largest city.

“Today’s power supply (availability) allows to supply the city and the district about 40 or 45%, but if we factor in critical infrastructure, then of course very little is left for ordinary citizens,” Kudrytskyi said.

The temperature in Odesa stood at two degrees Celsius (35.6°Fahrenheit) on Saturday and is due to dip below freezing for much of next week.

Shmyhal said he had ordered Ukraine’s foreign ministry to appeal to Turkey to send powerships – vessels that carry power plants – to come to the city’s aid.

The United States shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon as it floated off the country’s southeastern coast on Saturday, a Reuters witness and U.S. officials said, drawing to a close a dramatic spying saga that drew a spotlight on worsening Sino-U.S. relations.

President Joe Biden approved a military plan to shoot down the suspected Chinese spy balloon, U.S. officials said, as the government ordered a halt to flights around the South Carolina coast due to what it called an undisclosed “national security effort.”

The Pentagon did not immediately comment. Washington has called the balloon a “clear violation” of U.S. sovereignty.

Earlier on Saturday, Biden said the United States was “going to take care of” the suspected Chinese spy balloon, but did not elaborate. Asked if the balloon was going to be shot down, Biden gave a thumbs up to reporters.

A Reuters photographer said the suspected Chinese spy balloon was shot down over the southeastern U.S. coast. A stream came from a jet, hit the balloon but there was no explosion, the photographer said.

It then began to fall, the photographer said.

Military leaders earlier this week had recommended against shooting down the balloon when it was over Montana due to the risk of falling debris, officials said.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) paused departures and arrivals at three airports on Saturday, including Myrtle Beach International Airport on the South Carolina coast because of a “national security effort.”

The FAA issued a temporary flight restriction to clear airspace around the South Carolina coast. The notice blocked flights to more than 100 square miles (260 square kilometers) — mostly over the Atlantic Ocean, according to a document posted by the FAA. The notice warned the military could use deadly force if airplanes violate the restrictions and do not comply with orders to leave.

A Reuters photographer in the Myrtle Beach area could see the suspected spy balloon overhead, with two U.S. military jets flying alongside it.

China expressed regret that an “airship” used for civilian meteorological and other scientific purposes had strayed into U.S. airspace.

China’s foreign ministry said on Saturday that the flight of the “airship” over the United States was a force majeure accident, and accused U.S. politicians and media of taking advantage of the situation to discredit Beijing.

The suspected Chinese spy balloon prompted U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone a visit to China this week that had been expected to start on Friday.

The postponement of Blinken’s trip, which had been agreed to in November by Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping, is a blow to those who saw it as an overdue opportunity to stabilize an increasingly fractious relationship between the two countries.

China is keen for a stable U.S. relationship so it can focus on its economy, battered by the now-abandoned zero-COVID policy and neglected by foreign investors alarmed by what they see as a return of state intervention in the market.

The Pentagon said on Friday that another Chinese balloon was observed over Latin America, without saying where exactly.

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Why won’t the feds fork over the $2 billion that Massachusetts needs to start building two new bridges to replace the ancient spans over the Cape Cod Canal?

What is wrong with our uber-woke all-Democrat Congressional delegation that they can’t figure out how to get our cut of the trillions in freshly-printed, increasingly worthless Brandon bucks?

By the way, disregard the $2 billion figure that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is estimating as the required amount to get things rolling.

Remember, those bridges were built very quickly during the Depression. It’s on the sign at the top of the Sagamore — 1933-35. These new bridges will take at least a half-century, and probably cost closer to $100 billion. Two billion is the number for… year one.

After all, the state’s real motto is, “Don’t Kill the Job!”

There is a very easy way to make sure that the cash starts flowing our way instantly.

Just announce that the replacement Cape bridges are going to be named after some local ultra-left lunatic — God, or should I say Allah, knows that there are enough of them around here.

This was an idea that a host on a Cape Cod radio talk station came up with, and it’s perfect. By this point, anyone can write a grant proposal mixing ‘n’ matching all the obligatory PC phrases — diversity, equity, inclusion, sustainability, justice, environmental, climate, righting historical wrongs, etc. etc.

But renaming the bridges would take the Democrat nonsense one step further. If we just announce plans to honor those who have destroyed the nation, Massachusetts could cut in line for a Democrat handout faster than an illegal alien fentanyl dealer with tattoos on his face and a machete in his backpack.

Speaking of which, don’t we need proper memorials to those teeming hordes who made have the Commonwealth what it is today — illegal aliens?

The number of bridges we’re talking about here is two — the exact same number of Barack Hussein Obama’s illegal alien relatives who leeched off the state’s taxpayers for decades.

First, there was Auntie Zeituni, an illegal alien from Kenya who proudly and publicly lived on welfare, in public housing. She said God told her to come to America and go on the dole.

Then there was Uncle Omar, the drunk-driving package-store clerk who squatted in Framingham with a fraudulent driver’s license he’d first scammed for himself back in the 1970s.

Rename the Sagamore “the Zeituni,” and call the new Bourne Bridge “the Uncle Omar.”

You do that for Obama’s freeloading forebears and the spigot will be turned on. Forget that measly $2 billion. The drifters and grifters in the Congressional delegation will soon be posing with a giant cardboard check for… $200 billion.

The Rev. Al Sharpton will fly up for the ribbon cutting.

I have a different suggestion for the bridge in Bourne, or as Sen. Elizabeth Warren once pronounced it on live statewide TV, “Bern.”

Let us name the replacement “Bern Bridge” after Lieawatha herself. Call it “the Fake Indian.”

I can hear the traffic reports now: “Wow! Drivers, it will take you many moons to get over the Fake Indian tonight. You’ll be on the warpath if you have to get anywhere on the Cape right now. Ugh!”

Politicians have always been vain, but now they’re more insufferable than ever. Legends in their own minds is what they are, drama queens — look at the crying jags in D.C. last week. So the hacks think it’s only proper and fitting to have something named after themselves.

It doesn’t matter how absurd it is. Consider New York, which got rid of the beautiful bridge name of “Tappan Zee” (named after an Indian tribe!). New York renamed the new structure after a shameless homophobic hack Democrat (a white guy, by the way!) named Mario Cuomo, whose two sons are even more reprehensible than he was.

The puppet masters of Dementia Joe are throwing trillions at every silly, wasteful proposal out there — the more ridiculous the better, as long as it funnels millions to assorted poverty pimps, community activists, Democrat bundlers, advocates, racial arsonists and the gender-bending likes of Sam Brinton and Dr. Rachel Levine.

Speaking of which, one of the new bridges could honor a past Massachusetts statesman of the LGBTQ+ persuasion.

How about the late Rep. Gerry Studds, the serial pederast (fired by St. Paul’s School, then censured 420-3 by his fellow Congressmen for sodomizing an underage male page)?

But the Democrats have already named part of the Atlantic Ocean after their beloved hero — the Gerry Studds Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary.

So why don’t we call one of the bridges “the Barney Frank-Hot Bottom?” Barney, of course, is the New Jersey blow-in who represented Brookline and Newton in Congress.

Hot Bottom was Barney’s rent-boy, the male prostitute who set up his own personal house of ill repute in the carpet-bagging Congressman’s bed.

Barney’s bridge would quickly become known as “the Bottom,” and wouldn’t it be amusing to hear the traffic reporters talking about how “the Bottom” was all jammed up, etc.

The contemptible Kennedys already seem to have half the state’s public buildings named after them, but what about their many victims, especially women?

My modest suggestion would be to name the two new bridges the Mary Jo and the Marilyn, after Misses Kopechne and Monroe, respectively.

Those bridges could have exits memorializing other female victims of America’s First Family — the Pam Kelley Exit, or the Blue Dot Woman, or the Gloria Swanson…

When will Massachusetts make a decision on these new names for the bridges?

Well, as Ted Kennedy once said to Mary Jo, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it….”

The manner in which we perceive any given criminal investigation to be swift, timely, or slow is fascinating. For instance, most folks consider Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to be moving quickly with her criminal probe against Donald Trump, while most folks consider the Department of Justice to be moving extremely slowly with its criminal probe against Trump. Yet these two probes started at around the same time and, best anyone can tell, are now on track to indict Trump at right around the same time.

Then there’s the Manhattan District Attorney’s criminal case against Trump, which he swore was still ongoing back when he declined last year to bring tax fraud charges against Trump personally. Sure enough, just as the DA said all along would be the case, he’s now presenting a criminal case against Trump to a grand jury for indictment.

And so here we are, with all three major criminal probes now gearing up to criminally indict Donald Trump within roughly the same timeframe – just with very different real or perceived routes for getting there.

The Fulton County DA is probably getting the most favorable reviews from onlookers because she’s been the most open about how her case is progressing. The Manhattan DA did himself no favors by failing to explain last year why he wasn’t indicting Trump at the time, and by allowing the perception to exist that he was simply afraid to go first. And the DOJ simply doesn’t care what anyone thinks while its cases are ongoing.

But the bottom line is that all three ships are now coming in. Donald Trump will soon be hit with three different sets of criminal charges in three different jurisdictions, along with three different criminal trials taking place later this year. The odds of him being fully acquitted in any one of these cases are low. The odds of him being fully acquitted in all three cases are infinitesimally low. Trump, who has never been indicted before and has thus never been put on criminal trial, is now about to face three strikes at once.

The post Three criminal indictments and you’re Donald Trump appeared first on Palmer Report.

As a large Chinese balloon traversing the United States reached North Carolina on Saturday, Chinese officials were sticking by their claims that the vessel wasn’t being used for spying, but “for scientific research such as meteorology.”

But experts say that the balloon, which is being closely monitored by US officials, looks nothing like a typical weather balloon.

“The reported characteristics of this balloon don’t really match anything that we’re familiar with,” Jonathan Porter, the chief meteorologist at Accuweather, tells TIME.

US defense officials suspect that the balloon, first spotted on Feb. 1 above Montana, is a “high-altitude surveillance device,” posing as a civilian weather balloon. The Biden administration is considering a plan to shoot down the balloon once it is above the Atlantic Ocean where the remnants could potentially be recovered, the Associated Press reported on Saturday, citing four US officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive operation.

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Around the world, thousands of government-operated and privately owned weather balloons are launched daily to collect information about temperature, winds and moisture in the atmosphere. Porter explains that this balloon was detected so quickly and raised alarms because of its massive size. A typical weather balloon grows in size as it ascends through the atmosphere, starting off at about six feet wide, and expanding to roughly 20 feet in diameter as it rises. The Chinese balloon clocks in at around 90 feet wide, or the length of three buses, according to U.S. defense officials.

“The kinds of weather balloons that are launched twice a day from Weather Service offices are typically just a little box that has a temperature sensor, relative humidity sensor, pressure sensor and then a little tiny transmitter,” Alexandra Anderson-Frey, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington, tells TIME. “Based on the photos that have been going around, there’s obviously a lot more equipment on this one.”

Chinese officials have said that the balloon wound up over the U.S. when it blew off course, but experts question the validity of that claim, especially considering how far the balloon has traveled. U.S. defense officials estimate the balloon traversed the Pacific Ocean, from China to Alaska to Canada, before reaching the continental U.S. The Pentagon has said the balloon appears to be “traveling at an altitude well above commercial air traffic.”

“This has been traveling at a much longer distance than what would be these standard weather balloons. They go up over one particular place and up to about 50,000 feet in the atmosphere, and then that’s it, they’re done,” Porter says. “They don’t travel large distances, so I think that there’s pretty significant differences between typical weather balloons and this reported balloon.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken deemed the alleged spy balloon “unacceptable and irresponsible,” and proceeded to cancel his upcoming trip to China from Feb. 5 to Feb. 6, which was set to be the first high-level meeting between the U.S. and China in years. A second balloon with similarly suspicious characteristics was detected moving over Latin America on Friday.

Although China is notorious for keeping its technological research private, that likely would not explain the unusual characteristics of the balloon gliding over America, says Anderson-Frey. Most weather technology is consistent globally, she says, so the idea of China making such dramatic upgrades to one of its weather balloons would be very surprising.

“Weather technology that is currently in use has been in use for a very long time. A lot of the sensors have become a little more sophisticated, but relatively unchanged since the 70s, or 80s,” she says. “I haven’t heard word of any brand new developments in the weather world on the technology side of things.”

The scientist also expresses the confusion most experts have about why Chinese officials didn’t expect the balloon to cross the U.S. or face detection. “With the prevailing winds being the way they are, it was inevitable that this balloon would wind up over the United States, just with the way the wind speeds at those levels are right now,” Anderson-Frey says. “It shouldn’t have come as a surprise on their end.”

AP Photo/Michael Dwyer

• During a postgame interview on Thursday, Duke University coach Kara Lawson spoke passionately about the team’s Sunday game.
• According to Lawson, her players complained about the basketball during the first half of the game against FSU.
• While Lawson alleges it was men’s basketball used in the first half, the ACC and FSU concluded otherwise, per ESPN.

The coach of the Duke University women’s basketball team expressed her disdain for how an alleged ball mix-up was handled after a Thursday game.

Coach Kara Lawson ended her news conference after Duke’s win against the University of Pittsburgh by calling out her issues during a previous game against Florida State. According to Lawson, the Blue Devils and Seminoles spent the first half of Sunday’s game playing with a men’s basketball. Duke went on to lose the matchup by 13 points, 57-70.

“This would never happen in a men’s game. This would never happen,” she said at the postgame conference. “It’s embarrassing for our sport.”

Lawson said her players complained about the ball, making seven shots out of 34 attempts in the first 20 minutes of the game. Their opponents made 10 of their 30 shots in the first half, ESPN reported.

Basketballs used by men in the NBA and at the college-level have a circumference of about 29.5 inches while balls used by the WNBA and women’s college teams are 28.5 inches, according to digital sports publication Stack.com. Lawson and her team allege the correct balls were swapped in after Duke assistant coach Winston Gandy alerted officials at halftime.

“To have a game that, at the end of the season, could be the difference between a seed, between a title, my players don’t deserve that and neither do their players,” she said in the news conference.

Despite her outrage, Atlantic Coast Conference and Florida State officials concluded the ball used during the first half of Sunday’s game, which was played in Florida, wasn’t a men’s basketball.

“Following the thorough and objective review process, there was no evidence found to support the claim,” the conference said in a statement, per ESPN. “Per NCAA playing rules, there is no appeal or protest process.”

Despite Lawson’s concerns about the balls used during the game, she gave Florida State credit for the win.

“Let me be clear: Florida State beat us. They beat us playing with a men’s ball in the first half and a women’s ball in the second half,” Lawson said. “But I can’t say if we’d have played with a women’s ball in the first half and the second half that we would have won. But they can’t say that either.”

Duke has a 9-2 record this season in the ACC and is 19-3 overall.