Today’s edition of quick hits:
* The deadly violence isn’t limited to eastern Ukraine: “At least seven people were killed Monday after missiles struck the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, Ukrainian officials said. The attack was a deadly extension of Russia’s war into a city that has become a refuge for thousands fleeing from farther east as well as a major supply and logistics hub.”
* That said, the attack in eastern Ukraine is intensifying: “Russia began a new offensive Monday in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. The Russians in recent days had been building up their forces for an attack on what is Ukraine’s industrial heartland, an area where Moscow-back separatists have been fighting Kyiv for eight years.”
* In Mariupol: “Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, meanwhile, vowed to ‘fight absolutely to the end’ in strategically vital Mariupol, where the last known pocket of resistance in the seven-week siege consisted of Ukrainian fighters holed up in a sprawling steel plant. The holdouts ignored a surrender-or-die ultimatum from the Russians on Sunday.
* Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas dissented in this: “The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the Pentagon may take disciplinary action against a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve who refused to be vaccinated against the coronavirus on religious grounds.”
* The weekend’s mass shooting in South Carolina: “Police made an arrest following Saturday’s South Carolina mall shooting in which nine were shot and five others sustained injuries while fleeing, police said.”
* The weekend’s other mass shooting in South Carolina: “Authorities in South Carolina say they are investigating a shooting at a club in Hampton County early Sunday that left at least nine people injured.”
* The weekend’s mass shooting in Pennsylvania: “Two 17-year-olds were killed and at least eight others were shot in a mass shooting early Sunday in Pittsburgh, police said. The shooting happened just after 12:30 a.m. during a party at a short-term Airbnb rental property in the city’s North Side, the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police said in a news release.”
* The weekend’s mass shooting in Oregon: “A shooting left one teenage boy and three other teens injured in Southeast Portland near the city’s border with Gresham on Sunday night, according to family members of some of the victims.”
* A new TPS announcement: “The Biden administration announced on Friday that it would offer temporary protected status to nationals of Cameroon, shielding them from deportation and enabling them to obtain work permits, amid escalating armed conflict that has spawned a humanitarian crisis in the African country.”
* Energy policy: “The Biden administration announced on Friday that it would resume selling leases for new oil and gas drilling on public lands, but would also raise the federal royalties that companies must pay to drill, the first increase in those fees in more than a century.”
* A story about Alex Jones’ operation worth watching: “Infowars on Sunday filed for voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas in the face of multiple defamation lawsuits…. Alex Jones, founder of Infowars, was found liable for damages in a trio of lawsuits last year filed after he falsely claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre was a hoax.”
See you tomorrow.
