Politics & Stuff

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Sweden investigates second damaged Baltic Sea telecom cable

https://www.thelocal.se/20241119/sweden-investigates-second-damaged-baltic-sea-telecom-cable

Sweden is investigating a damaged telecommunications undersea cable linking it with Lithuania, said a Swedish minister a day after the announcement that a cable connecting Finland and Germany was cut in what Berlin considers 'sabotage'.

Minister for Civil Defence Carl-Oskar Bohlin told AFP in a written statement that it was "crucial to clarify why we currently have two cables in the Baltic Sea that are not working".

Bohlin added that "relevant Swedish authorities are investigating the events".

The "Arelion" submarine cable between the Swedish island of Gotland and Lithuania has been damaged since Sunday morning, a spokesman for the Lithuanian branch of the operator Telia said on Tuesday.

Internet traffic has been redirected to other international links, Audrius Stasiulaitis said.

"We can confirm that the interruption to internet traffic was not caused by an equipment fault but by material damage to the fibre optic cable," he said.

He added that customers were at this time not being affected by the outage.

On Monday, Finnish operator Cinia reported that a cable connecting Helsinki and the German port of Rostock had been cut for unknown reasons.

Germany and Finland subsequently said they had launched a probe into the damage, warning of the threat of "hybrid warfare".

German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius also said Tuesday that the severing of cables between Finland and Germany and from Sweden to Lithuania was a "clear sign that something is going on".

"Nobody believes that these cables were accidentally severed," Pistorius said on the sidelines of a meeting of EU ministers in Brussels.

"We have to say, without knowing exactly who it came from, that this is a hybrid action. We also have to assume, without knowing it yet, that it was sabotage," he said.

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https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-democrats-long-goodbye-to-the

Former president Donald Trump points at Drake Enterprises in Clinton Township, Michigan on September 27, 2023. (Photo by Nic Antaya for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

As we continue to sort through the wreckage of the 2024 election, one thing has become very clear: Donald Trump gained ground relative to 2020 in almost every state and with almost every demographic group. Even the most reliably Democratic constituencies, including racial minorities, shifted in his direction, an ominous sign that the party’s coalition may not be as solid as they once thought. Indeed, these results shone a spotlight on long-festering problems in the Democrats’ coalition, which have left them a shell of their former selves—as the party not of the multiracial working class but increasingly of society’s elites.

Though it may be hard to believe this fate has befallen the party of FDR, these changes didn’t happen overnight. Democrats were long considered by many Americans to be the party of the common man and woman. Mark Brewer, of the University of Maine, has found that in every presidential election between 1952 and 2004, the trait voters said they most liked about the Democrats was that they were “the party of the working class.” By contrast, the biggest mark against the Republicans was that they were viewed as the party of big business and the upper class.

 

These perceptions created a clear divide between the parties’ coalitions during that period: Democrats were likelier to win lower-educated and lower-income voters while Republicans were the favored party of many college-educated and affluent Americans.

At the same time, the parties had also begun to polarize along racial lines. Following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act under President Lyndon Johnson, black Americans almost uniformly threw their weight behind Democrats while white voters—especially working-class, white southerners—began a slow but inexorable slide toward Republicans. For a time, this realignment came at the expense of the Democrats: from 1968 through 1988, they won the presidency just once, in 1976.

However, by the 1990s, the country was growing more diverse and better educated. Bill Clinton was a beneficiary of this new reality, as he made sweeping gains with women, young people, voters of color (especially Hispanics), and college-educated voters. Importantly, he also retained significant support from white Americans and lower-educated voters, who made up the vast majority of the electorate. As Clinton rode this coalition to victory twice—marking the first time since FDR that a Democrat had won two full terms as president—some political observers, including my colleague, Ruy Teixeira, saw the emergence of a new majority, one that could consistently win elections using the formula Clinton had used.

In 2008, Barack Obama built on the Clinton coalition, bringing in even higher levels of support from almost every major party constituency, including blacks, Hispanics, Asians, young people, and women.1 He also notably became the first Democratic nominee since at least 1988 to decisively win voters who held a bachelor’s degree and fared far better with high-income earners than past Democrats had. These were the first signs of a growing professional class whose cultural values had aligned many of them with Team Blue—a departure from the past.

Obama’s two wins confirmed for many Democrats and Republicans the validity of the “emerging Democratic majority” thesis. Gone were the days when Democrats needed to win a majority of white voters, a feat they had found nearly impossible to achieve since the 1960s. Now, the party that represented America’s demographic future stood to lead it as well.2

But no sooner had that consensus come into focus than Donald Trump arrived on the scene. Trump disrupted the Democrats’ plans for building a dominant coalition and, in the process, helped precipitate a dramatic realignment between the two parties—one rooted in economic and social class. This change has tipped the demographic advantage in favor of Republicans and left Democrats at very real risk of losing many of the voters who not long ago were expected to deliver them an enduring majority.

In 2016, non-college-educated voters, a group that had backed Obama by four points in 2012, swung to Trump, who won them by six. This was a core driver of Trump’s win, as these voters made up a whopping 63 percent of the electorate that year. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton gained substantial ground with college graduates, who went from also backing Obama by four points to supporting her by 15—an early sign that Democrats would struggle to win at the national level without a critical mass of working-class voters behind them.

Four years later, as Joe Biden defeated Trump, the education gap grew even wider. Biden improved on Clinton’s advantage with college-educated voters by three more points, while Trump’s margin with non-college voters remained virtually unchanged—likely the difference in the outcome. Even in Biden’s victory, though, there were signs that the traditional Democratic coalition wasn’t holding. The clearest example was the rightward swing of Hispanic voters, who had backed Clinton by 38 points but supported Biden by only 26. There were also more modest signs of eroding support among black and Asian voters. In fact, a key driver of Biden’s win was improvements with white Americans: he lost them to Trump by only 13 points compared to Clinton’s 17-point deficit.

It seems plausible that because Democrats found success in 2020 and unexpectedly did so again in the 2022 midterms, they overlooked real problems under the hood of their coalition. Now, these problems finally caught up with them.

Initial data from the 2024 AP VoteCast survey shows that Kamala Harris matched Biden’s margin with white voters, but Trump made historic gains with non-white voters. He earned the highest share of Asian support since 2004, the highest share of black support since 1976, and the second-highest share of Hispanic support ever (he even nearly won Hispanic men outright). All this points to an American electorate that is becoming less polarized along racial and ethnic lines. While that may be a welcome development for society, it comes at the obvious expense of the Democrats, who had hoped these voting blocs would help them build a demographically dominant coalition for years to come.

Meanwhile, the transformation of the parties along class lines appears to be moving full steam ahead. Harris retained higher levels of support among college-educated voters, winning them by 14 points. But perhaps just as telling: she carried high-income earners (those earning at least $100,000) by seven points—by far the largest margin for a Democratic nominee in the modern era. On the other side, Trump became the first Republican nominee on record to win low-income voters, narrowly carrying them by three points. He also continued growing his advantage with non-college voters, winning them by 13 points—the largest margin for the GOP since at least 1988. And his 44 percent support from union households marked the greatest share for a Republican since Ronald Reagan.

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Looking at this picture, it’s hard not to see that the Democrats are becoming the very thing they have long fought against: the party of the elites. This stands in sharp contrast to their longtime image as the champions of the working class, which is further and further in the rearview mirror. According to political scientist Matt Grossmann, college-educated white voters this year became a plurality of the Democratic coalition for the first time ever, surpassing both non-college whites as well as voters of color.

On a more practical note, this new coalition also risks putting the Democrats on electorally unsound footing. Although college graduates are more reliable voters than their non-college peers, they also constitute a much smaller portion of the population. Without a meaningful share of working-class voters in the mix, the party will struggle to be competitive.

Strategists and pundits will argue in the months ahead about the best path forward for the Democrats, but suffice it to say: from both an electoral and moral standpoint, the party’s aim should be to figure out a path to reclaiming its roots as the party of the people.

Editor’s note: A version of this piece first appeared in Persuasion.

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https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/whats-next-for-independents

The movement away from two-party identification has intensified in recent years, with independents now making up around one-third of the electorate, and an even larger percentage of Americans overall. It’s important to recognize that independents are not a uniform group, and so their motivations and voting behavior differ from year to year. The group remains roughly comprised of a large pool of ideological moderates, two kinds of populist voters, and those who are politically disengaged.

Understanding the diversity of thought among independents, we can still examine recent trends with these voters and see how their past behavior might compare to 2024 when all the data is finalized.

For example, looking at Pew’s validated voter studies over the past few cycles, Donald Trump narrowly won independents on the whole (including party “leaners”) by a 43 to 42 percent margin in 2016 only to lose the group by 9 points to Joe Biden in 2020, 52 to 43 percent. Democrats also won independents by an even wider 15-point margin in the 2018 midterms when they regained control of the House of Representatives.

 

Although we won’t have comparable data for 2024 from Pew for a few months, the national exit poll for this year shows Harris winning all independents (including leaners as does Pew) by a 49 to 46 percent margin after Biden carried the group 54 to 41 percent in the 2020 exits. Despite Trump losing independents overall again in 2024, his 10-point improvement in the margin from 2020 (even if smaller in the validated data next year) clearly helped him to win a decisive if narrow popular vote and Electoral College victory this time around.

Regardless of the finality of the data at this stage, the trends are basically the same across all sources: Trump with a narrow independent win in 2016; Biden with the big advantage in 2020; and Harris likely with a narrow lead among independents in 2024.

What does the recent movement among independents tell us?

In pre-election surveys, independents favored Trump over both Biden and Harris on the two most important issues this cycle—the economy/inflation and immigration—while also trending more conservative on hot-button cultural issues. In contrast, independents generally favored Biden and Harris slightly more than Trump on a host of personal character issues and abortion.

Independents are a skeptical bunch—unimpressed with partisan rhetoric and propaganda and more “show me, don’t tell me.” If Trump and his party can continue to improve with these voters, particularly by delivering positive results on the two big issues of the economy and immigration, Republicans could conceivably maintain their grip on power and perhaps expand these gains in upcoming elections in 2026 and 2028.

However, Trump and the GOP shouldn’t count on independent support going forward.

We know that independents react strongly to economic conditions and do not particularly like the ideological agendas of either party when it comes to policies on economic growth, jobs, inflation, taxes, and spending. Trump’s proposals for across-the-board tariffs, extensive deregulation, and big new corporate tax cuts could turn out well in the eyes of these voters—or not. Likewise, Trump’s leadership style remains a wild card. Some aspects of his “bull in a china shop” demeanor might go over well with independents, while several more years of chaos, incompetence, and corruption like his first term will not.

It remains to be seen how Trump handles his new mandate and if he does things differently than last time.

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Given the inherent distrust and lack of interest in politics among many independents, it is best to exercise some caution in anticipating their reactions to future events and when examining possible vote intentions.

Independents are growing both in size and electoral power almost organically. No party actually represents independents or has the allegiance of these voters, despite some leanings given the forced two-party system. They remain a diverse group in terms of their economic, social, and cultural views. They do not like politics to begin with and do not trust either conservative or progressive partisan media outlets to tell the truth and present unbiased information. Third-party and other emerging membership groups capture some aspects of their opinions, but not fully.

If Democrats want to regain their advantage with independent voters, they will need to present a party brand, leadership, and agenda that is more “pro-worker, pro-family, pro-America” and less ineffective big-government spending and cultural extremism. If Republicans want to gain more support from independents, they will need to show them that they can govern the country respectably as a majority party committed to widely-shared economic growth and common-sense social policies—not excessively online, right-wing culture wars.

Given the internal dynamics and incentive structures of both Democrats and Republicans—and their relationship to ideological outliers within their respective coalitions—it seems unlikely that either party will figure out how to better represent independent voters permanently.

But whichever party manages to get closer to the media independent voter sooner will likely reap the rewards in upcoming midterm and presidential elections.

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The Unbelievable Trump

[Fulham Broadway 16,838]

3 hours ago, IMissEden said:

Officially, there is no group systematically killing young girls in the UK. But there is

Ok. Sources ? Evidence ? which group is it that is systematically killing young girls ?

 

3 hours ago, IMissEden said:

Fucked priorities.

Obviously you feel very strongly about this 'systematic killing of young girls in the UK' and you have it as a priority. What the fuck are you actually doing about it ??

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https://prospect.org/politics/2024-11-19-donald-trump-champion-working-class-discontent/

Donald Trump won the 2024 election because he was the change candidate who championed working-class discontent. He also successfully branded Kamala Harris, so voters worried about the kind of changes she would bring.

Harris had been speaking to more powerful currents of working-class discontent, and that put her in the lead. She promised to help with the cost of living, blamed monopolies for inflation, and vowed to shift power from the billionaires to the middle class. But she became ambivalent about championing those changes. That allowed Trump to regain momentum and win.

I do not believe Trump’s winning coalition will endure. Trump won a mandate on immigration, prices, and anti-“woke” policies, but he’s can’t maintain all of those priorities. Prices won’t rapidly fall unless there’s a damaging recession. His policies may raise interest rates, mortgage payments, and credit card debt. Tariffs may raise prices. And Trump is going to give the billionaires and big corporations the sweetest tax cut possible and make it as hard as possible for workers.

But Democrats will be forced to address many of the challenges raised by this election.

From the moment Joe Biden took office, the great working-class majority grew desperate with spiking prices, the safety of their neighborhoods, and government listening to the biggest corporations and elites and neglecting the concerns of working people.

The Biden administration acted impressively to address the pandemic and provide unprecedented levels of household support. Legislative action reduced health care expenses, invested in infrastructure and advanced manufacturing, encouraged the climate transition, and made big corporations pay more tax. The regulatory agenda showed support for unions and checks on monopolies. But Biden’s job approval was taken down by inflation and migration, like so many other leaders around the world, though other elements of his presidency contributed to his having the lowest approval for a president seeking re-election in recent memory.

You cannot address the party’s position without discussing them.

Everything in this article I shared in real time with the president, where possible, his White House and campaign teams, and then others on the vice president’s team. I don’t believe Biden’s campaign team served him or the country well.

OUR ELECTION WAS DOMINATED BY TWO ISSUES. The most important was the hard-working middle class being hit by high prices and the cost of living, while big corporations make super profits at its expense. The second was the border, and the perception that immigrants were both responsible for rising crime and prioritized for public services, while U.S. citizens went to the back of the line. Both issues saw a double-digit rise in their importance.

Those issues were the reasons two-thirds of the country and 60 percent of our base thought the country was headed in the wrong direction.

Trump focused every day on the awful crimes being committed by immigrants, as he had focused in 2020 on violent cities, “defund the police,” and Black Lives Matter protesters attacking police. For Blacks and Hispanics, crime competed for years with the economy as a top voting issue. In 2024, Trump made immigrants the reason for the prohibitive cost of living in housing and other goods, as well as why federal agencies dealing with natural disasters were broke.

Despite Trump’s effective campaign on his agenda, the cost of living was still the top worry by far—fully 18 points above immigration and the border.

Our base pulled back when Harris couldn’t find an issue where she differed with President Biden. And inexplicably, Harris stopped talking about the middle class and cost of living and, most important, became cautious about criticizing business. She spoke of “a few bad actors,” while “most companies are working hard to do the right thing by their customers and the employees who depend on them.”

Inexplicably, Harris stopped talking about the middle class and cost of living.

This is a time of historic consolidation of industries, historic profits, and stock buybacks that pushed income gains to the top .01 percent. And the public increasingly saw those excess profits as a major cause of inflation. Big business reached its lowest standing in Gallup. And Harris’s biggest advantage over Trump was on who “will work for the rich elites.”

In the closing weekend, Harris put the “cost of living” at the top of her “to do list,” but voters heard more “hope” than “anger.” She talked about taxing big corporations and billionaires, but not about changing government to work for the middle class, not the billionaires and monopolies, as she had earlier.

When Harris pulled back from her aggrieved middle-class narrative and critique of business, Biden’s anchor pulled her down.

The anchor included the perceived out-of-control border, which Trump linked to illegal immigrants committing violent crimes.

Biden’s upbeat economic message was a drag. He thought “Bidenomics” had produced a strong economy that was “the envy of the world.” He was joined by many economists, reporters, and other elected leaders who accepted his definition of a “strong economy”—low unemployment, millions of jobs, real income gains in the last year, soft landing and continued GDP growth, inflation trending down, and America’s economy performing better than any other.

That led to a false assumption that eventually people would feel it and give Biden credit. When reporters asked, why is Biden not getting credit, I was almost belligerent in responding, “Why are you asking? Are you in the bubble too?”

After the election, Ron Brownstein noted on X, “The cumulative weight of inflation is real, even though prices have stopped rising. Hard to avoid the conclusion the big price rises early in Biden’s presidency (and the pain imposed by the high interest rates used to fight them) was the biggest single factor in this election.”

Annie Lowrey wrote powerfully in The Atlantic about home prices jumping 47 percent since 2020, food inflation increasing at double the overall rate—margarine, eggs, peanut butter, crackers, and bread up 40 percent. Then, credit card APRs hit “all-time highs,” with household debt still rising and defaults still elevated.

To be fair, the Prospect has been writing about this dynamic for at least two years. I personally wrote in the Prospect and The Times of London that what matters is how many months people struggle with high prices. As those months tick off, people will only get angrier, rate the economy more poorly, and give you lower ratings on the economy.

Biden’s team could not be persuaded by polling data. At one point, I wrote in an email, “We are going to lose ground unless the President has a different close. There is a reason why his approval is stuck. He’s trying to convince people this is a good economy and it is anything but.”

I could not get people to understand the significance of our base voters putting the cost of living 20 points higher than the next problem. If you don’t start there, they won’t listen. Working people are struggling to pay the bills each month or stay out of poverty. They are looking for empathy and for you to battle the bad guys.

Some are asking whether Trump will benefit from Biden’s economy. The answer: only if prices drop.

BIDEN’S BIPARTISAN BRAND ALSO IRONICALLY put him out of touch with the extreme polarization of our times. “MAGA Republicans” was a way to talk about the Republicans he was fighting, not all Republicans. And the Harris campaign focused on moderate Republicans and Cheney conservatives who might defect. But they didn’t in large numbers. Was Liz Cheney their best closer?

Maybe his bipartisan focus explains why Republicans paid no price for defeating the Build Back Better Act, and in particular ending the expanded monthly Child Tax Credit. The internal Democratic debate focused on Sens. Manchin and Sinema. Biden never attacked Republicans for ending this critical help for families dealing with the high cost of living.

The bipartisan infrastructure law paradoxically may have hurt more than helped. Democrats did events all over the country highlighting the number of jobs and stronger economy expected from this law. Everybody reasonably thought they were talking about “the economy,” but not the “economy” seen by working people.

Meanwhile, Biden’s deep commitment to racial justice evolved into a pervasive identity politics. He always reminded people he ran in 2020 because of what happened in Charlottesville. He embraced “Black Lives Matter,” and promised to address America’s systemic racism. With the Supreme Court taking away Roe v. Wade, Biden ran in 2024 committed to protect constitutional rights for women and racial justice for Blacks.

They saw every voter through the lens of gender and race. Women care most about abortion. Hispanics, comprehensive immigration reform. “Dreamers” and a path to citizenship. Blacks, HBCUs and the legacy of slavery and racism. They insisted on that priority, even when you showed that these voting groups cared much more about affordable health care, a higher minimum wage, strengthened unions, and the expanded monthly Child Tax Credit.

The bipartisan infrastructure law paradoxically may have hurt more than helped.

They changed the primary calendar so South Carolina came first. Biden said, you are the voters who got me here. The campaign didn’t consider what that change meant for Hispanics and Nevada.

He took his campaign launch to an AME church in Charleston. He condemned white supremacy and the MAGA Republicans and described 20 areas of impressive work for Blacks. And when polls showed him short of 2020 with Blacks, he ran an ad that said, “Since day one, he has prioritized equity and racial justice by signing an executive order aimed to address systemic disparities affecting various communities and ensuring the full and fair participation of all communities in American life.”

Because the Black experience and slavery remained so central to Biden, it reinforced a pessimistic view of America that stalled in making progress. His vision lacked the optimism of a President Obama or the recognition of common challenges of a Rev. Martin Luther King. “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now,” King once said.

Hispanic communities are optimistic about this country and believe in its exceptionalism. They see themselves as part of a multiethnic America that fled impoverished homelands and expect each generation to do better than the next. And Harris did build on her own mixed ethnic history, frequently saying that “only in America” could her story be told.

But once you see only identity groups and accept imposing the elite’s priorities, you set the stage for a pervasive woke politics. Voters heard a Democratic Party that was working to rewrite American history, add non-gender bathrooms, and support transgender people getting surgery in prison and participating in women’s school sports. All of that featured in Trump’s strongest ads.

That explains why significantly more people feared Biden continuing in office than Trump returning.

HAD JOE BIDEN RETIRED AND THERE BEEN a normal presidential primary, potential nominees would have contested all these issues, and Democratic voters would have chosen the candidate best suited to defeat Trump. The Democrat would have figured out how to be the candidate of change by addressing working-class discontent. They would have addressed those deep concerns about Democrats. The candidate with the best chance of winning would have been strong on taking on big corporations and bringing down prices most of all, while advancing credible positions on crime, respect for police, the border, and woke policies.

Based on my surveys, that kind of candidate would have the best shot of winning the primary and would have looked much stronger against this even more dangerous version of Trump.

I don’t underestimate how difficult the task is facing Democrats. In a survey in the field now, Democrats have the most failing marks on “citizens having priority over non-citizens” and “listening to you, not the elites.”

This election has produced some new norms that will greatly impact what Democrats do right now. Ruben Gallego, who ran in the border state of Arizona, immediately delivered the message on controlling the border. “Our first commercial was about immigration and more border security in Spanish, because we heard about it earlier,” Gallego told CNN over the weekend.

And in the campaign itself, Harris spoke about enforcement first and funding the border wall, and promised to reintroduce that tough law and pass it.

Democrats in the Congress are going to defend the Dreamers and oppose family separation, but I expect a great many to vote for Trump’s funding of Homeland Security, ICE, and the wall.

And see what is happening with transgender rights. An overwhelming 65 percent of voters favor government barring transgender athletes participating in women’s sports. I’m for equality and don’t understand the visceral reaction. Nonetheless, I expect many, if not most elected Democrats to vote for this mainstream position.

Of course, this election suggests many other challenges. But they will have to proclaim that they authentically understand what ordinary Americans are going through.

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Russia steps up talk of using nuclear weapons as Ukraine fires western missiles

Kremlin changes doctrine to lower threshold for retaliation hours after Kyiv is said to have used US-supplied ATACMS long-range missile for first time

https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/russia-nuclear-weapons-attack-ukraine-missile-strike-br57nvzhn

Moscow will consider the use of nuclear weapons in retaliation to attacks on its territory with western-supplied weapons, the Kremlin has said, hours after Ukraine was said to have carried out its first strike on Russia with an American long-range missile.

On the 1,000th day of war between the two countries, President Putin approved an update to Russia’s nuclear doctrine, lowering the threshold at which it would consider a nuclear strike.

The revision states that an attack with conventional missiles, drones or other aircraft by a non-nuclear state that is supported by a nuclear-armed one could meet the criteria for a nuclear response.

• Will Russia use nuclear weapons? Putin’s options explained

A Yars intercontinental ballistic missile is launched during a test from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in Russia

RUSSIAN DEFENCE MINISTRY/REUTERS

It also said any aggression against Russia by a state which was a member of a coalition would be considered by Moscow to be aggression against it by the whole coalition.

The revision also significantly widens the triggers for possible nuclear retaliation compared with the previous version of the document.

Whereas in the last version the doctrine stated that a nuclear response could be issued in the case of threats to the “existence of the state”, the new update allows for a response to aggression that “poses a critical threat to sovereignty and/or territorial integrity”.

Putin mooted a change to the nuclear doctrine — last updated in 2020 — for several months as Ukraine’s western allies mulled the decision to grant Kyiv permission to fire the US-supplied Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) deep into Russian territory.

President Biden allowed President Zelensky to use American weapons against Russia after a long period of deliberation

JIM WATSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The approval of the change would appear to be a direct response to the White House’s announcement on Sunday that it would relax the limitations that it had placed on Ukraine’s use of the weapons.

Putin has continually sought to draw red lines to deter deepening western support for Ukraine, having said on the first day of the war that any attempts by the West to interfere would result in consequences “such as you have never seen in your entire history”.

However, as the war has progressed, those red lines have repeatedly been crossed without consequence, leading many to conclude that the Russian leader has been bluffing.

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, Ukrainian forces launched their first ATACMS strike on a military facility near the Russian city of Karachev in the Bryansk region, roughly 80 miles inside the border, according to local media.

The explosion in Karachev

Ukraine has argued that long-range weapons will enable it to severely hamper Russia’s supply lines by allowing it to strike at arms depots, air bases and oil refineries.

• How could long-range missiles affect the Russia-Ukraine war?

However, after months of delay over the decision by the White House, the Kremlin is believed to have already moved some military equipment, such as fighter jets, to bases that are out of range. There is also uncertainty about exactly how many of the US long-range missiles Ukraine has at its disposal.

Asked whether the updated doctrine was deliberately issued on the heels of Biden’s decision, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said the update was published “in a timely manner” and that Putin instructed the government to update it earlier this year so that it is “in line with the current situation”.

He said: “Aggression by a non-nuclear state with the participation of a nuclear state is considered as a joint attack,” adding that the update should be “studied” abroad.

Edited 1 hour ago by Vesper

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Nato forces deploy ‘game-changing’ new firepower in Finland drill

On the outskirts of the Arctic Circle, only 70 miles from the Russian border, the military alliance is conducting its largest-ever artillery exercise

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/defence/article/nato-forces-deploy-game-changing-new-firepower-in-finland-drill-r0b7s7j60

The sound of sleigh bells usually ring out around Rovaniemi on the outskirts of the Arctic Circle but deafening “deep strike” howitzer blasts are shattering the serenity this week.

Known as Father Christmas’s hometown, the snow-covered capital of Lapland seems an unlikely setting for Nato’s largest-ever artillery exercise.

However, it is near here, about 70 miles from the Russian border, that thousands of British, American and Finnish troops are drilling new “game-changing” firepower.

The Swedish-made Archers have replaced the British Army’s 30-year-old AS-90 howitzers

TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JAMES GLOSSOP

In the icy wilderness of the Rovajarvi firing range, a short drive from the city, The Times joined soldiers of 5 (Gibraltar 1779-1783) Battery Royal Artillery on Monday as they deployed Archer howitzers for the first time.

The new 155mm, 52-calibre self-propelled weapon, which can strike personnel and armoured vehicles up to 50km away, has doubled the battery’s effective range.

Moments after firing four rounds, with blasts that blew the phone from the hand of one journalist watching nearby, Major Neil Hart said that the £8 million truck-mounted weapon “delivers destructive firepower” that can “out-range any enemy guns”.

Everything from standard high-explosive rounds through to illuminated shells, smoke bombs and GPS-guided “seeker” munitions can be loaded into its 21-projectile ammunition belt.

Major Barney Ingram said the howitzer could “neutralise” enemy trenches, equipment and moving vehicles

TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JAMES GLOSSOP

Major Barney Ingram, the battery commander, another soldier braving -7C temperatures during the drill, said that the howitzer would “neutralise” enemy trenches, equipment and moving vehicles with a “mass area effect” on impact.

The Swedish-made Archers have replaced the British Army’s 30-year-old AS-90 howitzers, which were donated to Ukraine last year to help it repel Russian forces.

The weapons are being showcased as Finland hosts its first significant Nato exercise since joining the military alliance more than a year ago, in response to the growing threat from Russia.

The Nordic nation dropped decades of neutrality by becoming a member, in a move that also doubled the size of Nato’s border with Kremlin forces.

• Russia suspected over damage to Baltic Sea telecoms cable

Finland’s top brass say that their accession brings expertise in Arctic and forest fighting to the alliance. After Poland, it also boasts the largest artillery capability of all the Nato nations, with an arsenal of about 1,500 guns.

Despite having a population of just 5.5 million, Finland can muster a wartime force of 280,000 personnel thanks to its conscription service.

• National service in the happiest country: how Finland faces down Putin

The Finnish-led Exercise Lightning Strike is now training more than 3,600 local and allied troops to fight in harsh winter conditions. It is part of Dynamic Front 25, the biggest Nato artillery exercise ever held in Europe. Similar drills are also taking place in Estonia, Germany, Romania and Poland this month.

Finnish soldiers fire their K9 artillery during the exercise

TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JAMES GLOSSOP

At a different live-firing location several miles away from UK positions, Finnish forces demonstrated their “shoot and scoot” manoeuvres with armoured K9 “thunder” guns.

Three shells were shot in quick succession at targets up to 40 km away before the troops moved on to new tree-lined areas to avoid simulated retaliatory fire from enemy forces.

Lieutenant Antti-Matti Puista, who was leading a platoon of specially-trained Finnish conscripts, said: “In this exercise we’re firing high-explosive shrapnel rounds.

“If you’re on the ground [when a round hits], the shell will explode into a couple-thousand pieces that spread in a 360 degree field a few hundred metres from the point of impact.

“Within a 50m radius there wouldn’t be anything left.”

After the guns finally fell silent in the early afternoon, Colonel Janne Mäkitalo, the Finnish director of the exercise, told The Times that artillery was “the king and queen of the battlefield”.

Thanks to drone and surveillance advancements “everything can be seen on the battlefield”, he said, and “what can be seen on the battlefield can be targeted”.

“You cannot win wars only using only artillery, but you cannot win wars without it,” Mäkitalo added.

Edited 1 hour ago by Vesper

[Vesper 28,796]

Trump Confirms Plans to Use the Military to Assist in Mass Deportations
Mr. Trump’s top immigration policy adviser has discussed using military assets to build detention centers and support civilian immigration agents.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/18/us/politics/trump-military-mass-deportation.html

President-elect Donald J. Trump confirmed on Monday that he intended to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military in some form to assist in his plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

On his social media platform, Truth Social, Mr. Trump responded overnight to a post made earlier this month by Tom Fitton, who runs the conservative group Judicial Watch, and who wrote that Mr. Trump’s administration would “declare a national emergency and will use military assets” to address illegal immigration “through a mass deportation program.”

At around 4 a.m., Mr. Trump reposted Mr. Fitton’s post with the comment, “TRUE!!!”

Congress has granted presidents broad power to declare national emergencies at their discretion, unlocking standby powers that include redirecting funds lawmakers had appropriated for other purposes. During his first term, for example, Mr. Trump invoked this power to spend more on a border wall than Congress had been willing to authorize.

In interviews with The New York Times during the Republican primary campaign, described in an article published in November 2023, Mr. Trump’s top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, said that military funds would be used to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries.

The Homeland Security Department would run the facilities, he said.

One major impediment to the vast deportation operation that the Trump team has promised in his second term is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, lacks the space to hold a significantly larger number of detainees than it currently does.

That has sometimes led to allowing asylum seekers into the country while they await court dates with immigration judges, a practice critics deride as “catch and release.”

The Trump team believes that such camps could enable the government to accelerate deportations of undocumented people who fight their expulsion from the country. The idea is that more people would voluntarily accept removal instead of pursuing a long-shot effort to remain in the country if they had to stay locked up in the interim.

Asked about the proposal, Sabrina Singh, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon, declined to comment, calling it “a hypothetical.” In general, she added, such a plan would typically undergo “a rigorous process” before being enacted, but she declined to elaborate.

Immigrant advocates assailed the move, raising alarms about the potential fallout.

“President-elect Trump’s dystopian fantasies should send a chill down everyone’s spine, whether immigrant or native-born,” said Karen Tumlin, the director of the Justice Action Center, an immigrant advocacy organization. “Not only is what he is describing in all likelihood illegal, this move would be the exact opposite of the legacy of service in which my family members were proud to participate.”

Robyn Barnard, the senior director of refugee advocacy at Human Rights First, asserted that the consequences would be far-ranging. “Families will be torn apart, businesses left without vital employees, and our country will be left to pick up the pieces for years to come,” she added.

Congressional Democrats responded with a similar level of incredulity, asserting that such a move was all but certain to violate federal laws preventing the use of the military on American soil.

“We’re pursuing whatever we can do to make clear that the Insurrection Act should not permit that use of the military,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, referring to the 1807 law that grants presidents emergency power to use troops on domestic soil to restore order when they decide a situation warrants it. Under that law, “if there is no threat to public order of a fundamental, far-reaching kind, it would be illegal,” he added.

Republicans, however, suggested that Mr. Trump’s proposal might not be a radical departure from the status quo.

“Obviously they’re not law enforcement, but I have to see what their process is,” said Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, who served as the lead Republican negotiator on a bipartisan immigration deal that failed to pass the Senate after Mr. Trump urged the G.O.P. to reject it. “If the National Guard is providing transportation, they do that a lot already.”

Hard-right members of Congress and staunch supporters of Mr. Trump have expressed broad support for his proposal for mass deportations. Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, chimed in on social media on Monday to back using the military for such an effort, saying Mr. Trump was “100% correct.”

Mr. Miller has also talked about invoking a public health emergency power to curtail hearing asylum claims, as the Trump administration did during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Mr. Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the southern border amid a surge in asylum seekers and his reprogramming of military funds toward his border wall in 2019 was a face-saving way out of a spending standoff with Congress that had led to a government shutdown. It led to legal challenges that had not been definitively resolved before President Biden took over and halted further construction on the border wall.

Mr. Trump’s team said it had developed a multifaceted plan to significantly increase the number of deportations, which it thought could be accomplished without new legislation from Congress, although it anticipated legal challenges.

Other elements of the team’s plan include bolstering the ranks of ICE officers with law enforcement officials who would be temporarily reassigned from other agencies, and with state National Guardsmen and federal troops activated to enforce the law on domestic soil under the Insurrection Act.

The team also plans to expand a form of due-process-free expulsions known as expedited removal, which is currently used near the border for recent arrivals, to people living across the interior of the country who cannot prove they have been in the United States for more than two years.

And the team plans to stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to undocumented migrant parents in a bid to end birthright citizenship.

Mr. Trump has already signaled his intent to follow through on his promises with personnel announcements. He named Mr. Miller as a deputy chief of staff in his administration with influence over domestic policy. And Mr. Trump said he would make Thomas Homan, who ran ICE for the first year and a half of the Trump administration and was an early proponent of separating families to deter migrants, his administration’s “border czar.”

Mr. Homan told The New York Times in 2023 that he had met with Mr. Trump shortly after the now president-elect announced that he would seek office again. During that meeting, Mr. Homan said, he “agreed to come back” in a second term and would “help to organize and run the largest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”