George Gascón's Policies May Have Directly Led to the Murder of Two El Monte Police Officers (VIDEO)

Gascón's recall can't come soon enough.

At the Los Angles Times, "L.A. Dist. Atty. Gascón’s policy may have led to reduced prison time for man who killed El Monte officers":

The man who shot and killed two El Monte police officers Tuesday could have faced significantly more time in prison when he was last charged with a crime. But one of Dist. Atty. George Gascón’s most heavily criticized policies probably resulted in a lower sentence, according to documents reviewed by The Times.

Justin Flores, 35, who also died in Tuesday’s confrontation, was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm and methamphetamine when he was arrested by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies in 2020.

Flores had been convicted of burglary in 2011. Burglaries are strike offenses, which make suspects charged with later crimes eligible for harsher sentences. Flores’ earlier conviction means he had one strike against him when he was charged in 2020.

But the prosecutor assigned to the case, Deputy Dist. Atty. Larry Holcomb, said he had to revoke the strike allegation after Gascón took office, according to a disposition report reviewed by The Times. That’s because the new D.A. had issued a “special directive” that barred prosecutors from filing strike allegations on his first day in office.

Gascón’s policy regarding strikes was later deemed illegal by a Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge, after the union representing rank-and-file prosecutors sued, seeking an injunction. In February 2021, Judge James Chalfant ruled Gascón’s policy violated California’s “three strikes” law, which requires prosecutors to file strike allegations whenever a defendant has a previous serious or violent felony conviction.

An appellate judge upheld Chalfant’s ruling earlier this year.

Flores pleaded no contest to being a felon in possession of a firearm in 2021, and prosecutors agreed to drop all other charges, records show.

Though the gun conviction alone could have sent him to prison for up to three years, by pleading no contest, Flores was instead sentenced to two years’ probation and 20 days in jail.

There is no guarantee Flores would have still been in jail Tuesday, when he shot and killed El Monte Police Cpl. Michael Paredes and Officer Joseph Santana as they responded to a reported stabbing at the Siesta Inn.

But the removal of the strike allegation certainly cost prosecutors leverage when negotiating a plea, according to criminal justice experts.

Laurie Levenson, a professor of criminal law at Loyola Law School, said the blanket policy to disregard strike allegations was always going to run into trouble.

“If you are going to implement a blanket policy, you are always in danger of having a Willie Horton moment,” she said, “where that decision applied to one case results in a horrible outcome.”

Horton was convicted of first-degree murder in Massachusetts and sentenced to life in prison without parole. He escaped while on a weekend furlough program in 1986, then brutally raped a woman and assaulted her boyfriend.

The Horton case was used in an infamous attack ad against then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who was running for president in 1988 against George H.W. Bush.

Gascón has moved away from such blanket policies in recent months. Prosecutors can now request approval from a committee to either try juveniles as adults or pursue special circumstances allegations in murder cases, tactics Gascón had initially outlawed when he took office.

At least two such cases are now being reviewed by committees...

Still more.

 

"'A sex party organizer in New York asked invitees to check themselves for lesions before showing up. And the organizers of the city’s main Pride celebrations...'"

Oh boy.

At Althouse, "'... posted a monkeypox notice Sunday on their Instagram account... The virus, long endemic in parts of Africa, is now transmitting globally, and, while it can infect anyone, at the moment it is spreading primarily through networks of men who have sex with men, officials say.... 'Without meaning to make light of this, we have once again have been caught with our pants down by a global pandemic that we were not prepared for,' said Mark Harrington, the executive director of the Treatment Action Group and a long time AIDS activist...'"

RTWT.

Energy Inflation Derails Biden's Climate Agenda

Well, I guess that's one good thing about inflation. 

At the Wall Street Journal, "Under the president’s watch, emissions have risen, renewable-energy development has slowed and oil and coal use is up":

WASHINGTON—President Biden came to office vowing to cut dependence on fossil fuels, putting environmentalists in charge of energy policy and asking Congress for billions of dollars to fund a transition to cleaner energy.

Seventeen months later, greenhouse gas emissions are up, renewable-power development has slowed, and oil and coal consumption are on the rise. The biggest aspects of the green agenda are stuck in Congress, while Mr. Biden, facing surging energy prices and inflation, urged U.S. oil refiners this week to expand capacity.

Domestic oil and gas production has increased since Mr. Biden came into office and is projected to rise to record highs, but that has just inflamed concerns from environmentalists that Mr. Biden is backing away from his green agenda.

“I thought the country had turned a corner,” said Mary Nichols, a former California regulator and longtime environmental leader, “that the country was headed in the right direction.”

“Now this last year or two leaves you wondering whether that is true,” Ms. Nichols said.

Mr. Biden reaffirmed his environmental commitments Friday at the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, a virtual summit he hosted with representatives of more than 20 countries and international groups, including the European Commission and China.

“The critical point is that these actions are part of our transition to a clean and secure long-term energy future,” Mr. Biden said, adding later, “The science tells us that the window for action is rapidly narrowing.”

At home, however, Mr. Biden’s agenda has run into the reality of rising oil prices, punishing inflation and policy conflicts. Mr. Biden pledged last year to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 50% to 52% below 2005 levels by 2030. But doing so will require Congressional approval of measures such as tax incentives for clean energy, analysts say.

Coal-state Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.), who derailed Mr. Biden’s roughly $3.5 trillion climate and social spending bill last year, has been negotiating with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) on a new bill that would include the tax incentives, but a deal is far from certain.

The stakes for Mr. Biden are high. High inflation and record gasoline prices at the pump are a political liability heading into the midterm elections, where Republicans have a chance to seize majorities in the House and Senate.

At the same time, Mr. Biden risks losing support among young and progressive voters by seeming to back away from his green agenda, activists and political analysts said.

“It is hard to forever turn people out when you’re not producing results,” said Bill McKibben, an environmentalist and co-founder of 350.org, a group dedicated to stopping the use of fossil fuels world-wide. “Especially among young voters who care about this immensely there seems to be real signs it’s doing damage.”

Administration officials say they are still on course to meet their climate goals, citing measures including executive actions to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, spending to build out an electric-vehicle charging network and the rejoining of international climate talks.

Mr. Biden wants clean energy “installed here, deployed here and exported from here,“ Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said. ”He has taken steps in every single aspect of that to make those things happen. It doesn’t happen overnight.”

Some of the problems bedeviling Mr. Biden were triggered by events beyond his control.

The economy’s sharp rebound from the pandemic fueled higher demand for energy, raising costs. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine further taxed energy markets, leading Mr. Biden to label rising gas costs as “Putin’s price hike.”

Administration critics, however, say White House policy conflicts and political miscalculations made things worse as oil prices rose from roughly $53 a barrel when Mr. Biden took office to nearly $120 now.

One problem, these people say, was a too-rosy view of how smoothly the U.S. could move off fossil fuels. Mr. Biden used his first day in office to block completion of the Keystone XL oil pipeline and freeze new oil and gas leases on federal land.

“Unfortunately, what we have seen since January 2021 are policies that send a message that the administration aims to impose obstacles to our industry delivering energy resources the world needs,” Bill Turenne, a spokesman for Chevron Corp., said in a statement to reporters Wednesday.

Mr. Biden is now asking oil-and-gas companies to pump and export more in response to soaring prices and war in Europe, leaving him open to criticism from Republicans that his early decisions fed the problem and from environmentalists that he was backtracking on his climate agenda...

The January 6th Committee Is Pure Political Theater (VIDEO)

From Julie Kelly, at American Greatness, "January 6 for Non-Dummies":

During another public hearing on Monday, the January 6 select committee featured a witness so irrelevant that his appearance should prompt even the most ardent defender of Nancy Pelosi’s illegitimate inquisition to question the committee’s real purpose. Former Fox News talking head Chris Stirewalt, fired by the network shortly after the Capitol protest for calling the state of Arizona for Joe Biden early on election night, told his sob story to a presumably slim viewing audience.

The washed-up commentator, however, is the last person with any insight into the events of January 6, 2021. Stirewalt’s performance—similar to the overwrought speechifying by committee members last Thursday—is another headfake designed to turn attention away from the truth about what happened that day and in the months leading up to the brief disturbance that resulted in the deaths of four Trump supporters.

A well-oiled fog machine operated by the Department of Justice, congressional Democrats, NeverTrumpers, and the national news media is once again pumping lie after lie into the body politic in a last-gasp attempt to destroy Trump and the powerful political movement he created.

For nearly 18 months, American Greatness has covered this issue like no other outlet. So, as the committee continues its dog-and-pony show on Capitol Hill this month with an eye toward producing a long list of legislative “fixes,” the Justice Department inexorably moves to criminally charge Donald Trump for his alleged involvement, and the media takes another extended nap on its purported fact-checking duties, American Greatness here provides the definitive list of what people need to know about January 6, 2021, and related hype...

Keep reading.

 

GOP Primaries Test Limits of Trump's Influence (VIDEO)

At the New York Times, "G.O.P. primary victories in Nevada set the stage for Trump-centered battles in the fall":

Republican voters in Nevada on Tuesday elevated conservative candidates who have ardently embraced Donald J. Trump’s false claims of election fraud, turning a key swing state into a contest this fall between embattled Democrats and Republicans who insist President Biden stole the 2020 election.

The victories in the Nevada primaries for Mr. Trump capped a series of elections on Tuesday that saw one South Carolina Republican lawmaker who had crossed Mr. Trump go down in defeat, another survive her Trump-backed challenge and a Hispanic Republican grab a South Texas House seat vacated by a Democrat.

Those results gave mixed signals about Mr. Trump’s continuing grip on the party even as the scrutiny of his actions following his 2020 defeat intensifies. At the same time, the elections on Tuesday suggested that Republicans remain on course for strong gains in November’s midterms.

By flipping the Rio Grande Valley seat of former Representative Filemon Vela in Texas, Mayra Flores became the first Republican to represent the majority-Hispanic district in the seat’s 10-year history, and she became the first Republican Latina the state has ever sent to Congress.

In the sheer number of tossup contests, few states will rival Nevada this fall. Republicans see chances to unseat a host of Democrats, including Gov. Steve Sisolak; Lt. Gov. Lisa Cano Burkhead; three Democratic members of the House; and Senator Catherine Cortez Masto.

Among the Republicans who won their primaries Tuesday were Adam Laxalt, a Senate candidate and former Nevada attorney general who led Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, and Jim Marchant, a secretary of state candidate who has pressed conspiracy theories about voting machines and hopes to oversee the state’s 2024 election.

Election night on Tuesday started with the defeat in South Carolina of Representative Tom Rice by a Republican primary challenger endorsed by Mr. Trump, even as another South Carolina Republican, Representative Nancy Mace, survived.

Both Mr. Rice and Ms. Mace had crossed the former president as he struggled to maintain power after the Jan. 6 attack, which is now under the spotlight of congressional hearings. Mr. Rice, a staunch conservative in a conservative coastal district, was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him for inciting the riot. Ms. Mace, in her first speech as a newly elected freshman, said Mr. Trump bore responsibility for the deadly mayhem, though she did not vote to impeach him.

In turn, Mr. Trump backed Katie Arrington, a former state lawmaker, to take on Ms. Mace and State Representative Russell Fry to challenge Mr. Rice. Mr. Trump, who turned 76 on Tuesday, called on South Carolina voters to deliver him “a beautiful, beautiful birthday present” — twin defeats of both Ms. Mace and Mr. Rice.

The South Carolina contests had their own dynamics — Mr. Rice was defiant and contemptuous of Mr. Trump to the end, while Ms. Mace tried hard to regain the good graces of Trump administration officials if not Mr. Trump himself. The outcomes of both races could hold deep meaning to the party as it considers whether to renominate the former president for another White House run.

“This took a little bit of time, but we are finally here,” Ms. Mace told those gathered for a victory party in Charleston, as she thanked Ms. Arrington for “stepping into the arena.” She added, “this is going to make our campaign even stronger in November.”

The elections on Tuesday represented something of a midpoint in a Republican primary season that has delivered decidedly mixed signals to party leadership. Mr. Trump has claimed some significant wins, propelling his chosen Senate candidates to primary victories, such as J.D. Vance in Ohio and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. However, his endorsed candidates have lost primary showdowns for governor in Georgia and Nebraska as well as a key secretary of state race in Georgia.

Still to come are contests that rank high on his vengeance list, such as Representative Liz Cheney’s primary in Wyoming on Aug. 16...

 

Steven Saylor, Dominus

At Amazon, Steven Saylor, Dominus: A Novel of the Roman Empire.

Most Americans Oppose Trans Athletes in Women's Sports, Poll Finds

Like, we needed a poll for this? Actually, maybe so. Leftists deny and lie about everything, so it's always good to have hard data to prove they're inveterate liars.

At Free Beacon, "Poll: Americans Say ‘No’ to Transgender Athletes in Women’s Sports ":

A new poll from the Washington Post reveals most Americans agree: Transgender athletes in women’s sports should be sidelined.

Fifty-eight percent of respondents said transgender female athletes should be banned from professional competition. The same number agreed for college sports, and 55 percent and 49 percent of respondents supported a ban on transgender females in high school and youth sports, respectively. Nearly 70 percent said transgender girls would have a competitive advantage. The poll, which was conducted in concert with the University of Maryland's Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement and the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism, surveyed more than 1,500 people nationwide in May.

Transgender participation in sports was thrust onto the national stage this year when Lia Thomas, formerly William Thomas, won the NCAA Women's Division I Swimming and Diving Championships 500-yard freestyle event in March. Thomas’s swim time smashed national women’s records, and the athlete leaped from ranking 65th among collegiate men to first among collegiate women in the event.

In the past two years, 18 states have passed laws to limit or ban transgender athletes from female interscholastic sports...

 

Kodee-Lee

On Instragram.

Photos Capture Election-Night Tension at White House as Trump Family, Aides Watch Lead Fade Away (VIDEO)

Watch, at ABC News, "They reflect what advisers told the Jan. 6 committee despite Trump's claims":

A series of photos taken on election night 2020 inside the Trump White House captures the tension as Trump's family and his top aides track election returns and see Trump's early lead fade away.

The photos, taken by a White House photographer and published exclusively in the book, "Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show," are a visual representation of the testimony of senior Trump advisers who told the House Jan. 6 committee that they did not believe Donald Trump should declare victory on election night.

The photos show Trump's family and campaign team camped out in the Map Room of the White House.

The room, located in the basement of the White House residence, is where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tracked the movement of Allied Forces during World War II.

It's called the Map Room because some of the maps used by FDR are framed and on the walls.

For election night, however, Trump's political team transformed the room in to a campaign war room, installing large-screen televisions and placing them over FDR's maps. 

The photos capture the apparently pained expressions on the faces of Trump's inner circle...

They're all at the link.

Governor Ron DeSantis Celebrates Flag Day (VIDEO)

I'm seeing more and more talk about the candidate lineup for the 2024 GOP presidential primaries. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis certainly has demonstrated executive leadership in his state. He's bright, bold, and fearless. There are others who're also very impressive, but we'll have to see how things shake out after November, when the midterms are concluded, which is the traditional time you see aspirants announce their candidacies for the presidency.

Expect the Republicans to field an army hopefuls looking to be No. 47. I can't think of a more auspicious time to be in GOP elective politics.

DeSantis is making all the right moves, or at least, he's making moves, many bound to be popular with the national-populist base of the party. And patriotism --- seen here in the love for our founding documents --- is certainly going to be in demand in 2024.

In any case, Happy Flag Day!

Flag Day provides us an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of the American Flag as a symbol of liberty and justice. We appreciate all those who have fought for American principles both at home and abroad. pic.twitter.com/gPeyUIdjA2

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) June 14, 2022

The State Department's Toxic Equity Agenda

At City Journal, "Woke forces are working to turn America’s diplomatic corps into an arm of the Democratic Party":

Though support for the Black Lives Matter movement has plummeted over the last 12 months, many United States embassies and consulates will fly BLM flags again this year to mark Juneteenth. The display of BLM and Progress Pride flags, including at the U.S. Embassy in Vatican City, is just part of the State Department’s woke equity agenda, spearheaded by Ambassador Gina Abercrombie–Winstanley, the department’s first chief diversity and inclusion officer.

Winstanley participated in an Equity Town Hall this past week in order to discuss the State Department’s Equity Action Plan, which reads like something cooked up in the Evergreen State College faculty lounge. The 19-page document promises to “embed equity into U.S. foreign policies,” to “embed intersectional equity principles into diversifying public diplomacy,” and to “increase inclusive, equitable messaging to combat disinformation.”

A year ago, when I condemned the State Department in the Wall Street Journal for flying the BLM flag, BLM’s public support stood at around 50 percent, depending on the poll. Now that support has plummeted to 31 percent, according to a recent poll. A leaked cable in May 2021 revealed that State authorized posts to fly the BLM flag for the remainder of the year. A source told me that a February 2022 cable encouraged posts to fly BLM flags for Black History month and other occasions. The cable indicated that State Department lawyers believe that flying the flag isn’t a violation of the Hatch Act, which prevents federal employees from engaging in political activities at work. I asked a State Department spokesperson to confirm if posts were still authorized to fly BLM flags...

The embassies are overseas, though our country's being destroyed from within.

Keep reading.

 

Twitter Freaks Debate Deplatforming Libs of TikTok, Again, In Leaked Thread; Taylor Lorenz, Who Cries About Her Own Alleged 'Death Threats,' Mocks the Death Threats Libs of TikTok Receives

At AoSHQ, "The Purplehair Nosering Genderfux of Twitter are at it again, reports Libs of TikTok on her blog."

Why Aren't Democrats Dancing for Joy About Sky-High Gas Prices?

From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Joe Biden Gets Smashed by Resurrected Clip, Karine-Jean Pierre Flails in Response."

It's a link-fest over there, with this hypersonic missile of truth on gas prices:

The Good White Man Roster

From Freddie de Boer, "a database of progressive white men who are thirsty for credit":

You could be forgiven for thinking that we’re witnessing the end of the era of the white man. Headlines saying such are not hard to come by, after all, and media and academia are captivated by the notion that we white men must soon give way to women and people of color and, like, gray ace demisexuals or some such. So funny, then, and so profoundly American, that some of the most successful self-marketers of the 21st century are white men. They are, in fact, Good White Men.

These are the guys who have carefully crafted personas as ALLIES, as the good ones, as the right kind of white guy. These are the dudes whose every engagement on social media functions to let you know how very sorry they are, but always seem to come out on top in doing so. These are the guys who always stand behind women, ready to catch them when they fall, which they will inevitably do because of fucking patriarchy, man, and if people would just read their bell hooks maybe we’d be getting somewhere!, please like share and subscribe. These are the guys who think all complaints about identity politics, political correctness, and cancel culture are just the dying gasp of reactionary old men, which is why they lie awake at night praying to god that they never get canceled. These are the guys who put their pronouns in their bios in hopes that doing so might get them a little pussy. These are the guys who will harangue you about how white dudes do this and white dudes do that, speaking to you from their blameless white dude mouths in their righteous white dude faces. These are the guys who look at the discourse about white supremacy and patriarchy and see market opportunity.

There’s nothing wrong with being a white man who wants to do good. I am one, after all. The trouble is that the Good White Men believe that white men in general have some sort of inherent badness, that at the very least white men bear a special burden of helping to end injustice and to “center” women, people of color, and other minority groups, to step back and let others speak. Good White Males think whiteness and maleness are problems to be solved. The trouble here is twofold. First, simply by nature of being Good White Men, by the very act of endlessly talking about the sinful nature of other white men, the Good White Men exonerate themselves from the very critique they advance. Constantly complaining about the evil done by white men inherently and invariably functions to contrast themselves with other, worse white men. Being the white man who talks about the poor character of most white men cannot help but shine your own character. No matter how reflexively you chant that you realize that you yourself are part of the problem, no matter how insistently you say that you’re included in your own critique, you aren’t. You can’t be. To be the one who makes the critique inevitably elevates you above it.

He who humbleth himself wishes to be exalted...

 Continue on to the (familiarly hilarious) list, here.

The Bear Market Descends

The fear is palpable.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Dow Drops Over 800 Points; S&P 500 Closes in Bear-Market Territory as Stocks Slide":

Investors raise bets on aggressive Federal Reserve interest-rate increases; cryptocurrencies decline.

The stock-market selloff deepened Monday, with the S&P 500 entering a bear market, as investors took another look at Friday’s red-hot inflation data and liked it even less.

Faced with rising chances of aggressive monetary tightening by the Federal Reserve, investors broadly unloaded risk. The S&P 500 slumped 3.9% as 495 of its 500 components ended the day lower. The declines left the U.S. stock benchmark down more than 20% from its January record, sending it into a bear market for the first time since 2020.

Meanwhile, a rout in cryptocurrencies highlighted investors’ increasing unwillingness to hang on to their most speculative holdings. The price of bitcoin plunged below $23,000 before paring that loss to trade at 5 p.m. ET down 66% from its November high.

The drop in cryptocurrencies accelerated Monday after interest-rate fears sparked a weekend selloff. Bitcoin, the biggest cryptocurrency, traded at 5 p.m. at $23,250.72, a drop of 15% from 24 hours earlier. Ethereum was down 16% from 24 hours earlier to about $1,243. Shares of Coinbase Global fell 11%, while Celsius Network said it was pausing all withdrawals, swaps between cryptocurrencies and transfers between accounts, citing “extreme market conditions.”

Even rare bets that have worked in 2022 stumbled Monday. The energy segment, the only one of the S&P 500’s 11 sectors in positive territory this year, fell 5.1%, a steeper decline than that of the broad index. The utilities group, the second-best performer in 2022, also lagged behind the market with a daily drop of 4.6%.

“We’re definitely seeing a risk-off atmosphere, a flight to quality,” said Charlie Ripley, senior investment strategist at Allianz Investment Management. “In that environment, people need to raise cash.”

The S&P 500 fell 151.23 points, or 3.9%, to 3749.63. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 876.05 points, or 2.8%, to 30516.74. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite declined 530.80 points, or 4.7%, to 10809.23, off 33% from its November record.

Markets have swung wildly this year as investors scramble to decipher how rapidly the central bank will raise interest rates in an attempt to tame sky-high inflation. Rock-bottom rates and other stimulative policies helped keep the economy—as well as markets—afloat as the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic idled businesses and threw people out of work.

Now, the Fed is trying to tame surging prices by unwinding that easy-money policy. The Fed will begin its latest two-day policy meeting Tuesday, and most investors believe that the central bank will announce Wednesday it is raising its benchmark interest rate by half a percentage point...

Still more.

 

'That Doesn't Feel Like $150 Worth of Groceries'

From Samuel Gregg, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "Why inflation is worse than you think."

E. B. Sledge: With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

A classic, E. B. Sledge: With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa — Frontline Marine Combat in Two of the Bloodiest Island Invasions of World War Two.

Cities Die in Eastern Ukraine (VIDEO)

This ongoing war, keeps going. 

At the Los Angeles Times, "Under relentless Russian bombardment, Severodonetsk and other eastern Ukrainian cities are slowly dying":

LYSYCHANSK, Ukraine — How does a city die? To find out, turn to Severodonetsk, at the very edge of the Ukrainian government’s control on the eastern front, and currently the focal point of the fight between its soldiers and the Russians who have invaded.

Viewing Severodonetsk from across the river that separates it from its sister city Lysychansk, one witnesses the spasms in real time: Almost a dozen columns of smoke wreathe the skyline where tons of Russian ordnance smash through a building and start a fire, the flames twinkling in the distance like a votive candle. The soundtrack of the warfare— the bangs of artillery, the guttural whoosh of rockets launched in rapid succession, the snare-drum beat of heavy machine guns — signals fresh destruction to both cities.

“You never get used to it. It’s always terrifying,” said Natalya Sakolka, a 55-year-old mining engineer and administrator in Lysychansk, standing with a few neighbors in the backyard of her apartment building.

She grimaced every time a boom sounded. She grimaced often.

Ever since Moscow turned its sights on the Donbas, which encompasses the war-riven east Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk, the city of Severodonetsk, Kyiv’s seat of power in Luhansk, has been a key target. In the months since its late February invasion of Ukraine began, the Russian army has made a torturously slow — but steady— advance in the east, unleashing the full power of its artillery arsenal and pummeling its way to almost full control of Luhansk.

Severodonetsk, together with Lysychansk, represent the last 3% of the province.

In May, a combined force of Russian troops, separatists and Kremlin-allied Chechen fighters blitzed into the city, taking a series of Ukrainian positions in residential neighborhoods. Now, they’re locked in a bare-knuckled street brawl with Ukrainian defenders bunkered no more than 300 yards away even as artillery thunders above them, turning onetime industrial hubs into what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described in a recent speech as “dead cities.”

The signs are obvious: There’s no electricity, let alone internet or phone service. Gas is cut off and, most crucially, so is water. An estimated 85% of the 220,000 residents here have fled, with those remaining largely the poor, the infirm and the elderly, as well as their caretakers.

But you won’t see them on the streets. Only a few residents, along with uniformed personnel, dare go above ground to scrounge supplies from the few shops in Lysychansk still open, or queue for assistance packages and water deliveries trucked into neighborhoods by the police or fire departments.

Driving is a fraught, nerve-racking game: With artillery batteries assisted by drones hunting for prey, the banshee-scream of incoming Russian ordnance reverberates often across the deserted boulevards. The warning sounds come too shortly for one to do anything but hurtle to the ground, hoping to be far enough and hidden enough to avoid shrapnel.

It’s a game in which the Ukrainians are almost hopelessly outmatched, they say.

“This is not a war of soldiers. It’s a war of artillery. The difference in approach between us and them is that they don’t have to count their ammo while we have to save it,” said Luhansk Police Chief Oleh Hryhorov, a laconic man who has remained — along with his officers — on the job to maintain order in the decreasing patch of territory under government control.

“To compare,” he said, “they’re using one ton; we’re using a kilogram. So they’re just burning everything.”

Facing such a barrage, whether in the Donbas or on other fronts, has been costly. This month, Zelensky said 100 of his soldiers were dying in combat every day; other officials say the figure is now double. The constant stream of armored ambulances racing from the front lines to the Lysychansk military hospital hints at the toll.

Those losses have spurred Ukrainian officials to plead with Western nations for more ammunition and better weapons, especially long-range multiple- launch rocket systems, or MLRS.

“We have Russian logistical hubs nearby that we can’t reach. Why? Because we don’t have enough weapons,” said Mariana Bezuhla, the deputy head of Ukraine’s parliamentary committee on national security. She spoke in a government building in Lysychansk, where she was helping coordinate evacuations from there as well as Severodonetsk.

“We wouldn’t be in this situation if we had the MLRS months ago,” she said. “And for what? Why the delay? Or course there’s a concern about such tempo.”

On Saturday, a series of shells arced into a neighborhood nestled on a hill in Lysychansk that faces Severodonetsk. One of them slammed into 44-year-old Nikolai’s house. None of his family — his wife, Victoria, and three children, Arseniy, Vladislav and Yelizavyeta (they gave only their first names for reasons of privacy) — were hurt, but a fire blazed and spread rapidly across the roof. With a neighbor, Nikolai tried to douse the flames with whatever water they had been able to collect in recent days.

It wasn’t enough: Soon a hole opened up in the ceiling, dumping a shower of ash and red-hot embers into a corridor while Nikolai ran in and tried to gather up some of his family’s belongings. Watching the fire engulf one of the rooms, Victoria began to cry, screaming through tears of rage, “My home, my home is gone!”

By the time a lone firetruck showed up — it was the only one still undamaged, department officials said, adding that they deal with 10 to 15 fires a day, all caused by shelling — there didn’t seem much left to save. Nikolai watched with a sad smile as a weak stream of water came from the hose; it barely reached the blaze.

“It’s like they’re watering a garden,” he said of the firefighters, before turning away and taking another drag of his cigarette...

 Keep reading.

Emma

She's a graduate of the University of Southern California, with washboard abs. 

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador Brings Back Mexico's Nationalization of the Economy

This never ends well for Mexico, and especially not for U.S. taxpayers, who always get stuck with the bill when the U.S. government rushes in to bail out our southern neighbor every time its economy crashes. 

At the Wall Sweet Journal, "Mexico Takes Aim at Private Companies, Threatening Decades of Economic Growth":

Populist president seeks to reclaim state control over oil-and-gas, electricity sectors; ‘It’s a closing off of Mexico’.

MONTERREY, Mexico—For the past 20 years, a 1,100-megawatt power plant owned by Spain’s Iberdrola SA outside Mexico’s industrial capital has kept the lights on for scores of companies such as brewing giant Heineken NV, despite winter freezes, a hurricane and the occasional brush fire.

But since January, half the gas-fired plant has been forcibly shut down by Mexico’s government, which argues that private energy companies have plundered Mexico like Spanish conquistadors of old. The electricity shutdown forced dozens of firms in Monterrey to return to the inefficient and more costly state-run utility for their power.

In September, a fuel-import terminal owned by global investment firm KKR & Co. was closed at gunpoint by Mexico’s energy regulator, months after it closed two other such terminals owned by U.S. companies. Last year, the government took over operating control of the biggest oil find in recent Mexican history, stripping it from a U.S. company that made the discovery. It is also trying to revoke the operating license of Latin America’s largest wind farm, majority owned by Japan’s Mitsubishi Corp., an example of how the government’s policies are hobbling Mexico’s transition to renewable energy.

Going after private companies might seem like something from the playbook of Socialist Venezuela rather than Mexico, which in recent decades has transformed itself into one of the world’s most globalized nations, signing free-trade deals with more than 40 countries and using manufacturing exports to become the U.S.’s second largest trading partner. Along the way, it lifted millions of its citizens out of poverty.

But Mexico’s populist leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office in 2018, is shifting the country to a 1970s industrial policy focused on the domestic market, natural resources such as oil and greater state intervention, from backing state-run energy giants to using the army for major public-works projects.

“It’s a closing off of Mexico,” says Gabriela Siller, an economist at Mexico’s Tecnológico de Monterrey.

The change is especially stark in Mexico’s crucial energy sector, where the government has launched a broad effort to stop new private investment and restore the dominant position of former government monopolies in both oil and gas and electricity—effectively reversing a 2013 constitutional overhaul that opened both markets to private firms.

The moves will cost Mexico billions of dollars in forgone investment; raise domestic energy prices; limit the growth of oil and electricity output; and damage the competitiveness of Mexican companies and hundreds of multinationals that operate here, according to the U.S. government, private companies and economists. It also risks prompting more migration by job-seeking Mexicans to the U.S.

The president says, without offering evidence, that past governments were paid off by multinationals to allow them to enter the market and destroy the state oil giant Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, and the state-run utility, Federal Electricity Commission, or CFE, leaving Mexico’s energy security at risk and consumers at the mercy of profiteers. He also argues that Mexico’s turn to an open economy left too many poor people behind.

“They had a plan to close all the CFE plants and leave everything to the private sector, to such a degree that half our country’s electricity is now made by private companies,” the president said at a news conference.

The CFE has a monopoly on residential power, which it subsidizes heavily. But it lost hundreds of industrial clients over the past decade as firms opted for cheaper electricity provided by private firms. The CFE usually doesn’t subsidize electricity for large corporate clients, and its prices can be up to 30% to 50% higher than those of private power producers. Some privately produced renewable energy is a third of the price of the CFE’s power, according to Mexico’s renewable energy association.

In many ways, the decommissioned electricity plant outside Monterrey is a metaphor for Mexico’s stalled economy and a glimpse of the country’s potential economic future.

From 2019 through 2021, the first full three years of Mr. López Obrador’s presidency, Mexico’s economy shrank an average of 1.14% a year, according to government data. While the U.S. regained its prepandemic level of economic output by mid-2020, Mexico is among the few countries in the hemisphere, along with the leftist dictatorship of Venezuela, that hasn’t yet recovered, according to estimates from the International Monetary Fund.

The Mexican economy is now lagging that of the U.S. and Canada in a sustained way for the first time since shortly after the mid-1990s, when all three countries banded together in a free-trade deal then called the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

Next year, Indonesia is set to overtake Mexico as the world’s 15th-biggest economy, according to IMF estimates.

At the same time, migration from Mexico has accelerated to the U.S. for the first time since the early 2000s. In fiscal year 2021, U.S. apprehensions of Mexican migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border more than doubled over the previous year to almost 655,600. That figure is set to rise in 2022, U.S. government data show.

Mexico’s average electricity prices for companies are already about 40% higher than the U.S., according to Mexican business chamber Concamin, putting the country at a disadvantage for manufacturing. But economists say Mr. López Obrador’s policies will make matters far worse.

Since Mr. López Obrador took power, the government has halted new auctions for oil-and-gas exploration by private firms, new mining concessions and new investments for private electricity generation, including solar and wind farms that can produce electricity at roughly a third the CFE’s average cost, according to figures from Mexico’s energy regulator.

Last year, the government passed a law forcing the national electric grid to give priority to electricity produced by the CFE, even though its power is more costly and polluting than that of private firms. The laws retroactively affected an estimated $22 billion in investment by firms such as Iberdrola. Energy regulators have also tied up oil-and-gas firms from Shell to BP to prevent them from opening up new filling stations to compete with state oil giant Pemex, the companies said.

The law forcing the grid to use the CFE’s electricity first could raise Mexico’s electricity costs by up to 52%, or some $5.5 billion a year, and boost CO2 emissions by up to 73 million tons a year, a 65% jump from current emissions, according to a recent study by the U.S. government’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. That would prevent Mexico from meeting its carbon reduction goals under the Paris Climate Agreements, say environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council. Mexico’s Environment Ministry declined to comment.

Felipe Calderón, Mexico’s president from 2006 to 2012, tweeted last October, “What Mexicans need is more clean energy…and not more polluting and expensive energy from the CFE. The government’s changes seek to stop renewable energy from private firms and force us all to pay for old fossil-fuel energy.”

Thanks to more than 200 lawsuits against the new dispatch rules, a judge last year ordered the government to temporarily block their implementation. The government is appealing the order and has vowed to start implementing the changes despite it. Mexico has halted auctions for new renewable-energy investments. Three such auctions between 2015 and 2017 were so successful they doubled the country’s renewable energy capacity to 15 gigawatts, according to the wind industry association. During the 2017 auction, Mexico set a then-world record low price for wind power per megawatt hour and close to a record in solar, making both forms of energy produced here far cheaper than electricity made by fossil fuels and among the cheapest sources of energy in the world.

With no more private investment in wind or solar farms, the country’s renewable energy capacity will stall. Mexico’s state utility is currently building five natural-gas fired power plants and doesn’t plan on opening its first solar farm until 2027. It has no plans for wind farms.

“If Mexico can’t create a legal framework to promote renewable energy, then General Motors isn’t going to get rid of its zero carbon plans. Unfortunately, we just won’t consider Mexico as an investment choice,” Francisco Garza, the president of GM in Mexico, recently told a meeting of financial executives.

Foreign direct investment during Mr. López Obrador’s first three years averaged $31.4 billion a year versus $35.7 billion a year during his predecessor’s six-year term, according to central bank figures. Meanwhile, for the first time since NAFTA came into effect, Mexico saw a net outflow of investment in publicly traded stocks and bonds for two consecutive years.

The government’s policies are causing the country to miss out on a historic chance to attract more U.S. companies that are trying to diversify their supply chains away from China and face growing labor shortages at home, economists say.

“The Mexican government needs to do some soul searching about why investment has been so weak,” said Alberto Ramos, chief economist for Latin America at Goldman Sachs. “It’s not just the pandemic. I think it’s the overall business environment, and it’s a pity because there are great opportunities Mexico could be taken advantage of.”

KKR said it planned to sue the Mexican government for $667 million in damages linked to the takeover of its fuel terminal. Houston-based Talos Energy said it would pursue international arbitration over the government’s decision to seize operating control of its Zama field, which shares oil with a neighboring field under Pemex’s control.

Mexico’s government said it is in talks with Talos, KKR and other U.S. firms to resolve the issues.

The three closed fuel terminals all supply gasoline to private oil companies that are competing with state oil firm Pemex to sell gasoline, part of the 2013 overhaul in Mexico that ended Pemex’s monopoly...