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Blizzard kills 13 in Buffalo, New York area

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A lethal blizzard paralyzed Buffalo, New York, on Christmas Day, trapping motorists and rescue workers in their vehicles, leaving thousands of homes without power and raising the death toll from storms that have chilled much of the United States for days, Reuters reported.

At least 30 people have died in US weather-related incidents, according to an NBC News tally, since a deep freeze gripped most of the nation, coupled with snow, ice and howling winds from a sprawling storm that roared out of the Great Lakes region on Friday.

CNN has reported a total of 26 weather fatalities.

According to Reuters much of the loss of life has centered in and around Buffalo at the edge of Lake Erie in western New York, as numbing cold and heavy “lake-effect” snow – the result of frigid air moving over warmer lake waters – persisted through the holiday weekend.

Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said the storm’s confirmed death toll climbed to 13 on Sunday, up from three reported overnight in the Buffalo region. The latest victims included some found in cars and some in snow banks, Poloncarz said, adding that the death tally would likely rise further.

“This is not the Christmas any of us hoped for nor expected,” Poloncarz said on Twitter on Sunday. “My deepest condolences to the families who have lost loved ones.”

New York Governor Kathy Hochul called it an “epic, once-in-a-lifetime” weather disaster that ranked as the fiercest winter storm to hit the greater Buffalo area since a crippling 1977 blizzard that killed nearly 30 people, read the report.

“We have now surpassed the scale of that storm, in its intensity, the longevity, the ferocity of its winds,” Hochul told an evening news conference, adding that the current storm would likely to go down in history as “the blizzard of ’22.”

The latest blizzard came nearly six weeks after a record-setting but shorter-lived lake-effect storm struck western New York.

Despite a ban on road travel imposed since Friday, hundreds of Erie County motorists were stranded in their vehicles over the weekend, with National Guard troops called in to help with rescues hindered by white-out conditions and drifting snow, Poloncarz said.

Many snow plows and other equipment sent on Saturday and Sunday became stuck in the snow, “and we had to send rescue missions to rescue the rescuers,” he told reporters.

According to Reuters the Buffalo police department posted an online plea to the public for assistance in search-and-recovery efforts, asking those who “have a snow mobile and are willing to help” to call a hotline for instructions.

The severity of the storm was notable even for a region accustomed to harsh winter weather.

Christina Klaffka, 39, a North Buffalo resident, watched the shingles blow off her neighbor’s home and listened to her windows rattle from “hurricane-like winds.” She lost power along with her whole neighborhood on Saturday evening, and was still without electricity on Sunday morning.

“My TV kept flickering while I was trying to watch the Buffalo Bills and Chicago Bears game. I lost power shortly after the 3rd quarter,” she said.

John Burns, 58, a retiree in North Buffalo, said he and his family were trapped in their house for 36 hours by the storm and extreme cold that he called “mean and nasty.”

“Nobody was out. Nobody was even walking their dogs,” he said. “Nothing was going on for two days.”

Snowfall totals were hard to gauge, he added, because of fierce winds that reduced accumulation between houses, but piled up a 5-foot (1.5-meter) drift “in front of my garage.”

Hochul told reporters on Sunday that the Biden administration had agreed to support her request for a federal disaster declaration.

About 200 National Guard troops were mobilized in western New York to help police and fire crews, conduct wellness checks and bring supplies to shelters, Hochul said.

The larger storm system was moving east on Sunday, after knocking out power to as many as 1.5 million customers at the height of outages late last week and forcing thousands of commercial flight cancellations during the busy holiday travel period, Reuters reported.

More than 150,000 US homes and businesses were without power on Sunday, down sharply from the 1.8 million without power as of early Saturday, according to PowerOutage.us. In Buffalo, 15,000 residents were still without electricity on Sunday evening, Poloncarz said.

He said one electrical substation knocked offline was sealed off by an 18-foot-tall mound of snow, and utility crews found the entire facility frozen inside.

Christmas Day temperatures, while beginning to rebound from near-zero readings that were widespread on Saturday, remained well below average across the central and eastern United States, and below freezing even as far south as the Gulf Coast, National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologist Rich Otto said.

Nearly 4 feet of snow was measured at Buffalo airport by Sunday, according to the latest NWS tally, with white-out conditions lingering south of Buffalo into the afternoon as continuing squalls dumped 2-3 inches of snow an hour.

In Kentucky, officials confirmed three storm-related deaths since Friday, while at least four people were dead and several injured in auto-related accidents in Ohio, where a 50-vehicle pileup shut down the Ohio Turnpike during a blizzard on Friday.

Other deaths related to extreme cold or weather-induced vehicle accidents were reported in Missouri, Tennessee, Kansas and Colorado, according to news reports.

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US, Russia agree to restore diplomatic missions as first step in Ukraine war talks

The Riyadh talks were aimed as a step toward ending Russia’s war in Ukraine after President Donald Trump, who took office last month, ordered top officials to begin negotiations.

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The U.S. and Russia agreed on Tuesday to restore the normal functioning of each other’s diplomatic missions, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said after talks between senior U.S. and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia.

The move appeared to signal a significant easing of restrictions on Russian diplomatic missions in the United States that were imposed by past U.S. administrations over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and other Russian actions, Reuters reported.

The Riyadh talks were aimed as a step toward ending Russia’s war in Ukraine after President Donald Trump, who took office last month, ordered top officials to begin negotiations.

Rubio said the sides agreed as a first step to appoint teams of officials to “work very quickly to re-establish the functionality of our respective missions.”

The two countries have expelled diplomats and limited the appointment of new staff at each other’s missions in a series of tit-for-tat measures over the past decade, leaving their respective embassies thinly staffed.

Rubio said those moves had “really diminished our ability to operate in Moscow” and that Russia would say the same about its mission in Washington, read the report.

“We’re going to need to have vibrant diplomatic missions that are able to function normally in order to be able to continue these conduits,” Rubio told the Associated Press.

He said he would not negotiate in public the details of how the missions would be restored.

The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for details of the current operations of U.S. missions in Russia.

Rubio’s Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, raised the functioning of Russia’s U.S. missions with Rubio in a call on Saturday ahead of the talks in Riyadh, Russia’s foreign ministry said.

Even before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, U.S. officials complained they were able to maintain only a “caretaker presence” in Russia, after Russia imposed a cap on personnel in U.S. missions, forcing Washington to shutter its consulates in Vladivostok and Yekaterinburg.

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Zelenskyy warns against ‘repeat of Afghanistan scenario’ in Ukraine

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US President Donald Trump’s move to advance peace negotiations with Russia – but without Ukraine’s participation – has sparked serious concerns in Kyiv and across Europe with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warning that the end of the Ukraine war could result in a situation similar to Afghanistan in 2021.

Zelenskyy’s remarks came on the eve of talks between Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

These talks, which are part of new efforts by US President Donald Trump to advance peace negotiations, have sparked concerns that Washington and Moscow might shape Ukraine’s future without its involvement.

Zelenskyy meanwhile said: “You can’t just take that off the table. That’s not how it works. I don’t think anyone is interested in an Afghanistan 2.0,” Zelenskyy said, referring to US government statements that Ukraine would not become a NATO member.

He specifically pointed to the hasty withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan, which was negotiated during Donald Trump’s first term and rapidly implemented under former president Joe Biden in 2021. This led to a chaotic retreat and the collapse of the former Afghan government.

Zelensky stressed that back then, “lack of respect for human life” led to the “tragedy.” He added: “So there are experiences with what happens when someone ends something without thinking it through and withdraws very quickly.”

While acknowledging that Ukraine is now a different country than at the beginning of Russia’s invasion, with experience in its own arms production, Zelenskyy emphasized that “there will definitely be no victory for Ukraine without US support.”

UK reacts to Trump’s initiative

Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer also spoke out against Trump’s move to broker peace with Russia, without Ukraine’s involvement, and warned the US president against letting Ukraine become an “Afghanistan-style disaster”.

Starmer made the comparison with the collapse of Kabul in 2021 – which Trump branded “one of the greatest defeats in American history” and urged the US not to make too many concessions to Russia.

Starmer stressed that any resolution must be lasting and prevent Russia’s President Vladimir Putin from “coming again” for more territory.

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Israel receives shipment of heavy bombs cleared by Trump

The MK-84 is an unguided 2,000-pound (907-kg) bomb, which can rip through thick concrete and metal, creating a wide blast radius, Reuters reported.

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Israel has received a shipment of heavy MK-84 bombs from the United States, after U.S. President Donald Trump lifted a block imposed on the export of the munitions by the administration of predecessor Joe Biden, the defence ministry said on Sunday.

Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Trump said he lifted a Biden-era block on the export of the bombs to Israel despite a ceasefire agreement being in place because he believed in “peace through strength.”

“They contracted for the weapons a long time ago with the Biden administration, and then Biden wouldn’t deliver the weapons. But I look at it differently. I say, ‘peace through strength,'” Trump told reporters after returning to West Palm Beach, Florida, after a short trip to Daytona Beach. “They were sitting there. Nobody knew what to do with them. They bought them.”

The MK-84 is an unguided 2,000-pound (907-kg) bomb, which can rip through thick concrete and metal, creating a wide blast radius, Reuters reported.

The Biden administration declined to clear them for export to Israel out of concern about the impact on densely populated areas of the Gaza Strip.

The Biden administration sent thousands of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Palestinian Hamas militants from Gaza but later held up one of the shipments. The hold was lifted by Trump last month.

“The munitions shipment that arrived in Israel tonight, released by the Trump administration, represents a significant asset for the Air Force and the IDF and serves as further evidence of the strong alliance between Israel and the United States,” Defence Minister Israel Katz said late on Saturday.

The shipment arrived after days of concern about whether a fragile ceasefire in Gaza agreed last month would hold, after both sides accused each other of violating the terms of the deal to halt fighting to allow the exchange of hostages held in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israeli jails, read the report.

Washington has announced assistance for Israel worth billions of dollars since the war began.

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