Nation & World Briefing |

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s capital came under one of the biggest attacks of the war on Friday as Russia’s invading forces fired dozens of missiles across the country, triggering widespread power outages, Ukrainian officials said.

Gunfire from air defense systems and thudding explosions combined with the wail of air-raid sirens as the barrage targeted critical infrastructure in cities including Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kryvyi Rih and Zaporhizhzhia. The head of the Ukrainian armed forces said they intercepted 60 of 76 missiles launched.

“My beautiful sunshine. What am I going to do without you?” wailed Svytlana Andreychuk in the arms of Red Cross staffers. Her sister Olha was one of three people killed when a missile slammed into a four-story apartment building in Kryvyi Rih.

“She was so cheerful in life. She was a beauty. She helped everybody. She gave advice to everybody. How I love you so,” said Andreychuk.

In Kyiv, city council member Ksenia Semenova said 60% of residents were without power Friday evening, and 70% without water. The subway system was out of service and unlikely to be back in operation Saturday, she said.

Russian strikes on electricity and water systems have occurred intermittently since mid-October, increasing the suffering of the population as winter approaches. But the Ukrainian military has reported increasing success in shooting down incoming rockets and explosive drones.

Friday’s attacks took place after the United States this week agreed to give a Patriot missile battery to Ukraine to boost the country’s defense. Russia’s Foreign Ministry warned Thursday that the sophisticated system and any crews accompanying it would be a legitimate target for the Russian military.

The U.S. also pledged last month to send $53 million in energy-related equipment to help Ukraine withstand the attacks on its infrastructure. John Kirby, spokesman for the White House National Security Council, said Friday that the first tranche of that aid had arrived in the country.

More than half the Russian missiles fired Friday targeted Ukraine’s capital. The city administration said Kyiv withstood “one of the biggest rocket attacks” it has faced since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly 10 months ago. Ukrainian air defense shot down 37 of about 40 missiles that entered the city’s airspace, and one person was injured, it said.

Ukraine’s air force said Russian forces fired cruise missiles from the Admiral Makarov frigate in the Black Sea, while Kh-22 cruise missiles were fired from long-range Tu-22M3 bombers over the Sea of Azov, and tactical aircraft-fired guided missiles.

WASHINGTON — An Iowa construction worker and QAnon follower was sentenced Friday to five years in prison for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, when he led a crowd chasing a police officer who diverted rioters away from lawmakers.

Wearing a T-shirt celebrating the conspiracy theory with his arms spread, Douglas Jensen became part of one of the most memorable images from the riot.

As he handed down the sentence, Judge Timothy Kelly said he wasn’t sure Jensen understood the seriousness of a violent attack in which he played a “big role.”

“It snapped our previously unbroken tradition of peaceful transfer of power. We can’t get that back,” Kelly said. “I wish I could say I had evidence you understood this cannot be repeated.”

Jensen was convicted at trial of seven counts, including felony charges that he obstructed Congress from certifying the Electoral College vote and that he assaulted or interfered with police officers during the siege. His sentence also includes three years of supervised release and a $2,000 fine.

He gave a brief statement to the judge, saying that he wanted to return to “being a family man and my normal life before I got involved with politics.”

Jensen scaled a retaining wall and entered through a broken window so he could be one of the first people to storm the Capitol that day, Kelly said. He led a group that chased Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman up a staircase. He would later re-enter the building and scuffle with police.

“Doug Jensen wanted to be the poster boy of the insurrection,” prosecutor Emily Allen said.

Jensen wore a T-shirt with a large “Q” on it because he wanted the conspiracy theory to get credit for what happened that day, his defense attorney Christopher Davis said.

Davis said Jensen’s own “childhood of horrors” influenced his later faith in the baseless belief that former President Donald Trump was secretly fighting against enemies in the “deep state” and a child sex trafficking ring run by satanic pedophiles and cannibals.

It also includes the apocalyptic prophesy that “The Storm” was coming and would usher in mass arrests and executions of Trump’s foes, including then-Vice President Mike Pence, who Trump would deride that day as lacking courage.

Davis has argued Jensen was dressed as a “walking advertisement for QAnon” and not intending to attack the Capitol. He did not physically hurt people or damage anything inside the Capitol, Davis said, and many friends and family members wrote letters to the judge on his behalf.

Goodman’s quick thinking that day — to divert the rioters away from the Senate and then find backup — avoided “tremendous bloodshed,” Capitol Police Inspector Thomas Lloyd said Friday.

Pence was presiding over the Senate on Jan. 6 as a joint session of Congress was convened to certify President Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory. Before the riot, Trump and his allies spread the falsehood that Pence somehow could have overturned the election results.

Approximately 900 people have been charged with federal crimes for their conduct on Jan. 6. More than 400 of them have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanor offenses. Sentences for the rioters have ranged from probation for low-level misdemeanor offenses to 10 years in prison for a man who used a metal flagpole to assault an officer.

RAPA NUI, Chile — The hillside of Rano Raraku volcano on Rapa Nui feels like a place that froze in time.

Embedded in grass and volcanic rock, almost 400 moai – the monolithic human figures carved centuries ago by this remote Pacific island’s Rapanui people — remained untouched until recently. Some are buried from the neck down, the heads seemingly observing their surroundings from the underground.

Around them, there has been a pervasive smell of smoke from still-smoldering vegetation – the vestige of a wildfire that broke out in early October. More than 100 moai were damaged by the flames, many of them blackened by soot, though the impact on the stone remains undetermined. UNESCO recently allocated nearly $100,000 for assessment and repair plans.

In this Polynesian territory that now belongs to Chile and is widely known as Easter Island, the loss of any moai would be a blow to ancient cultural and religious traditions. Each of the moai – the nearly 400 on the volcano and more than 500 others elsewhere on the island — represents an ancestor. A creator of words and music. A protector.

The president of Rapa Nui’s council of elders, Carlos Edmunds, recalled his emotions when he first heard about the fire.

“Oh, I started crying,” he said. “It was like my grandparents were burned.”

It takes a close look at a map of the Pacific to find Rapa Nui, a tiny triangle covering about 63 square miles  Home to about 7,700 people – about half of them with Rapanui ancestry — it’s one of the world’s most isolated inhabited islands. The quickest way to get there is a six-hour flight from Santiago, Chile, covering 2,340 miles. Much farther away, to the northwest, are the more populous islands of Polynesia.

The remoteness has shaped the community’s view of the world, its spirituality and culture. Its small size also plays a part: it seems everyone knows one other.

Rapa Nui was formed at least 750,000 years ago by volcanic eruptions. Its first inhabitants were sailors from Central Polynesia who gradually created their own culture. The moai were carved between the years 1000 and 1600.

The first Europeans arrived in 1722, soon followed by missionaries. Current religious activities mix ancestral and Catholic beliefs.

The arrival of outsiders had grim effects: Hundreds of Rapanui were enslaved by Peruvian raiders in 1862 and taken to South America, where many died in cruel conditions.

In 1888 Chile annexed the island and leased it to a sheep company. Only by the 20th century did the islanders begin to recover their autonomy, though there were no written Rapanui annals to recount their early history.

Without such books to preserve their legacy, the Rapanui have imprinted their people’s memory in activities and traditions passed from generation to generation. The hand of the fisherman who casts a hook carries the wisdom of his ancestors. The women’s hairstyle evokes the pukao, a hat made of reddish stone placed on the heads of the moai.

At 2 in the morning on Oct. 4, when the fire was finally controlled, those risking their safety around the burning crater were untrained volunteers using shovels and rocks, cutting down trees and branches.

The fire covered 254 hectares. It originated away from the volcano, on a cattle ranch, but the wind brought flames to Rano Raraku. Some residents say they know who started the fire, but don’t expect any punishment due to a cultural reluctance to file a complaint against fellow Rapanui.

It is not certain how the moai – which average 13 feet in height and weigh many tons  were transported to their ahu. One theory is that they were moved as if they were standing, dragged with small turns as one would do with a refrigerator.

WASHINGTON – After scaling 40-year highs, inflation in the United States has been slowly easing since summer. Yet the Federal Reserve seems decidedly unimpressed — and unconvinced that its fight against accelerating prices is anywhere near over.

On Thursday, stock markets buckled on the growing realization that the Fed may be willing to let the economy slide into recession if it decides that’s what’s needed to drive inflation back down to its 2% annual target.

The S&P 500 stock index lost roughly 100 points — 2.5% — in its worst day since early November. The losses came a day after the Fed raised its benchmark interest rate for the seventh time this year. The half-point hike the Fed announced — to a range of 4.25% to 4.5% — had been widely expected.

What spooked investors was Wall Street’s growing understanding of how much further the Fed seems willing to go to defeat high inflation. In updated projections they issued Wednesday, the Fed’s policymakers forecast that they will ratchet up their key rate by an additional three-quarters of a point — to a hefty 5% to 5.25% — and keep it there through 2023. Some Fed watchers had expected only an additional half-point in rate hikes.

Those higher rates will mean costlier borrowing costs for consumers and companies, ranging from mortgages to auto and business loans.

The policymakers also downgraded their outlook for economic growth in 2023 from the 1.2% they had forecast in September to a puny 0.5% — as near to a recession forecast as they were likely to make. What’s more, they raised their expectation for the unemployment rate next year to 4.6% from 3.7% now.

All of which suggested that the officials expect — or at least would accept — an economic downturn as the price of taming inflation.

The message the Fed was sending, said Ryan Sweet, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, was blunt: “We’re going to break something. We’re going to break inflation or we’re going to break the economy.”

Many investors had convinced themselves that with inflation pressures gradually easing, the Fed might soon declare some progress in their fight and perhaps even reverse course and cut rates sometime in 2023.

There was seemingly reason for optimism: Consumer prices rose 7.1% last month from a year earlier, down from 9.1% in June and the fifth straight drop. Even more encouragingly, on a month to month basis, prices inched up just 0.1%. And core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy costs and which the Fed tracks closely, rose just 0.2% from October to November, the mildest rise since August 2021.

A slowing economy has eased pressure on supply chains, which had previously been overwhelmed with customer orders, causing shortages, delays and higher prices. Oil prices, too, have plunged, easing prices at the pump. A gallon of unleaded gasoline cost an average $3.19 on Thursday, down from $5.02 in mid-June, according to AAA.

Yet Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who had been slow to recognize the inflation threat when it emerged in the spring of 2021, was in no mood to celebrate. Powell essentially shrugged off the signs of incremental progress.

“Two good monthly reports are very welcome,” he told reporters Wednesday. “But we need to be honest with ourselves… 12-month core inflation is 6%” — three times the Fed’s target. “It’s good to see progress but let’s just understand we have a long ways to go to get back to price stability.”

BEIJING — Deaths linked to the coronavirus are appearing in Beijing after weeks of China reporting no fatalities, even as the country is seeing a surge of cases.

That surge comes as the government last week dramatically eased some of the world’s strictest COVID-19 containment measures. On Wednesday, the government said it would stop reporting asymptomatic COVID-19 cases since they’ve become impossible to track with mass testing no longer required.

That halt in reporting made it unclear how fast the virus is spreading. Social media posts, business closures and other anecdotal evidence suggest huge numbers of infections.

It’s also unclear how many people are dying from the virus. An AP reporter who visited the Dongjiao Funeral home was told by relatives that at least two people cremated there had died after testing positive.

Health authorities had designated Dongjiao and one other funeral home to cremate those who die after testing positive, according to a relative of one of the dead. The woman said her elderly relative had fallen ill in early December, tested positive, and died Friday morning in an emergency ward.

She said there were lots of people in the emergency ward who had tested positive for COVID-19, adding that there weren’t enough nurses to take care of them. The woman did not want to be identified for fear of retribution.

Over about an hour, an AP reporter saw about a dozen bodies wheeled from the Dongjiao funeral home.

About a half-dozen people inside described how another victim had struggled to breathe that morning before dying, and the death certificate listed “pneumonia” as the cause of death, even after a positive test for COVID-19, one of those people said. The people interviewed did not want to be identified for fear of retribution.

China has not reported a death from COVID-19 since Dec. 4.

China’s official death toll remains low, with just 5,235 deaths — compared with 1.1 million in the United States. However, public health experts caution that such statistics can’t be directly compared.

Chinese health authorities count only those who died directly from COVID-19, excluding those whose underlying conditions were worsened by the virus. In many other countries, guidelines stipulate that any death where the coronavirus is a factor or contributor is counted as a COVID-19-related death.

Under the relaxed rules, obligatory testing is no longer required and people with mild symptoms are permitted to recover at home rather than go to a quarantine center. Meanwhile, the semi-autonomous gambling enclave of Macao will scrap its mandatory hotel quarantine for arrivals from Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas starting Saturday, the government said.

However, travelers must spend five days in home isolation and undergo testing, and are barred from entering mainland China until the 10th day upon arrival. Both Macao and Hong Kong have scrapped most anti-COVID-19 measures.

Satellite launched to map the world’s oceans, lakes, rivers

A U.S.-French satellite that will map almost all of the world’s oceans, lakes and rivers rocketed into orbit Friday.

The predawn launch aboard a SpaceX rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California capped a highly successful year for NASA.

Nicknamed SWOT — short for Surface Water and Ocean Topography — the satellite is needed more than ever as climate change worsens droughts, flooding and coastal erosion, according to scientists. Cheers erupted at control centers in California and France as the spacecraft started its mission.

“It is a pivotal moment, and I’m very excited about it,” said NASA program scientist Nadya Vinogradova-Shiffer. “We’re going to see Earth’s water like we’ve never before.”

About the size of a SUV, the satellite will measure the height of water on more than 90% of Earth’s surface, allowing scientists to track the flow and identify potential high-risk areas. It will also survey millions of lakes as well as 1.3 million miles (2.1 million kilometers) of rivers.

The satellite will shoot radar pulses at Earth, with the signals bouncing back to be received by a pair of antennas, one on each end of a 33-foot boom.

It should be able to make out currents and eddies less than 13 miles across, as well as areas of the ocean where water of varying temperatures merge.

NASA’s current fleet of nearly 30 Earth-observing satellites cannot make out such slight features. And while these older satellites can map the extent of lakes and rivers, their measurements are not as detailed, said the University of North Carolina’s Tamlin Pavelsky, who is part of the mission.

Perhaps most importantly, the satellite will reveal the location and speed of rising sea levels and the shift of coastlines, key to saving lives and property. It will cover the globe between the Arctic and Antarctica at least once every three weeks, as it orbits more than 550 miles high. The mission is expected to last three years.