Day: January 7, 2025
The country’s top doctor is calling for cancer risk warning labels on alcohol. On “Post Reports,” why, and what that could mean for you. Read more: Last week, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said in an advisory that studies suggest alcohol is the third leading preventable cause of cancer, contributing to 100,000 cancer cases and 20,000 related deaths each year. For that reason, he says health warning labels on bottles of alcohol should be updated to include a cancer risk warning and that recommended limits for alcohol consumption should also be reassessed, given the increased risk of certain cancers. Today on “Post Reports,” public health reporter Fenit Nirappil breaks down the science behind the surgeon general’s advisory, what it would take to get warning labels amended and what it could all mean for you. Today’s show was produced by Rennie Svirnovskiy with help from Sabby Robinson. It was edited by Lucy Perkins with help from Monica Campbell and mixed by Sam Bair. Subscribe to The Washington Post here .
With Donald Trump set to return to the White House in the coming weeks, speculation is mounting that Ukraine and Russia may soon begin serious peace negotiations. However, there is very little sign that Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to abandon his goal of subjugating Ukraine. Instead, the peace formula currently being promoted by Kremlin officials would be more likely to pave the way for the next stage in Putin’s campaign to erase Ukrainian independence entirely.
Ever since the abortive peace talks of spring 2022 during the initial phase of the full-scale invasion, Russia has insisted that any peace deal must include territorial concessions from Kyiv along with Ukrainian neutrality and the country’s comprehensive demilitarization. Putin himself spelled out Russia’s territorial expectations in June 2024, demanding that Kyiv cede four partially occupied Ukrainian provinces, none of which are fully under Russian control. This would mean handing over large amounts of unoccupied Ukrainian territory including the city of Zaporizhzhia with a population of around three quarters of a million people.
On numerous other occasions, Putin and his Kremlin colleagues have reaffirmed their conditions. These include Ukraine officially giving up its pursuit of NATO membership and agreeing not to enter into any military alliances with Western powers. Kyiv is also expected to accept extensive limitations on the size of its armed forces and on the kinds of weapons systems it is allowed to possess.
These proposals are not a recipe for a sustainable settlement. On the contrary, Putin’s peace plan is in fact a call for Kyiv’s complete capitulation. Moscow’s demands are deliberately designed to leave Ukraine internationally isolated and unable to defend itself. If these terms are imposed on the Ukrainian authorities, there can be little doubt that Putin would use any subsequent pause in hostilities to rearm before renewing the war in the coming years.
Stay updated
As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.
Russia’s true intentions can be seen in its insistence that Ukraine abandon efforts to join NATO and accept permanent geopolitical neutrality. Moscow claims this is essential in order to safeguard Russian national security, but Putin’s own actions suggest otherwise.
When neighboring Finland announced plans to join NATO in 2022, Putin made no effort to block the process and announced that Russia had “no problems” with Finnish accession. He then went even further, withdrawing most Russian troops from the border with Finland. Clearly, Putin does not view NATO as a security threat to Russia itself. Instead, he sees the alliance as a potential obstacle to his own expansionist ambitions in Ukraine.
Russian demands for a neutral and demilitarized Ukraine should be equally unacceptable in Kyiv and among Ukraine’s Western partners. Agreeing to the Kremlin’s conditions would mean leaving millions of Ukrainians at Putin’s mercy, while also emboldening Moscow and inviting more Russian aggression. From Chechnya and Georgia to Crimea and Syria, there is ample evidence from the past two decades that each successive failure to hold Russia accountable only encourages fresh escalations.
The West’s misguided efforts to appease Putin have already led to the largest and bloodiest European war since World War II. Any further attempts at appeasement will have similarly disastrous consequences for the future stability and security of Europe. Indeed, senior European officials are now warning that a military confrontation with Moscow is becoming more likely, with German spy chief Bruno Kahl recently predicting that Russia may seek to test NATO before the end of the current decade.
Eurasia Center events
While Russia is pushing for a disarmed and neutral Ukraine, Ukrainian officials are preparing for possible peace talks by prioritizing the need for credible security guarantees. In recent months, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has signaled the country’s readiness to temporarily compromise on territorial integrity in order to move forward toward a viable peace. At the same time, officials in Kyiv have underlined that there is no room for any similar compromises on the issue of security guarantees.
Ukraine’s objective remains NATO membership, which is seen in Kyiv as the only credible long-term guarantee of the country’s security and sovereignty. However, key members of the alliance including the United States and Germany remain deeply reluctant to embrace Ukraine’s NATO aspirations.
With their country’s pathway to NATO accession likely to be extremely politically challenging, Ukrainian officials are also exploring the possibility of bilateral security guarantees. In a recent interview with US podcaster Lex Fridman, Zelenskyy said security guarantees for Kyiv to end Russia’s war would only be effective if the United States provides them. He was also scathing of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which saw Ukraine surrender the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for security assurances from Russia, the US, and the UK that ultimately proved worthless.
Given the diametrically opposed positions of Russia and Ukraine on the issue of NATO membership, it seems certain that security guarantees will be the most problematic point during any forthcoming negotiations to end the war. Can Western leaders come up with a credible security formula that will safeguard Ukrainian statehood and deter further Russian aggression? Unless they do so, Ukraine’s prospects will be grim and the rest of Europe will face years of costly confrontation with a resurgent Russia.
Serhii Kuzan is Chairman of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center (USCC). He formerly served as an adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense (2022-2023) and as an advisor to the Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council (2014).
Further reading
UkraineAlert
Jan 2, 2025
Missiles, AI, and drone swarms: Ukraine’s 2025 defense tech priorities
By
Nataliia Kushnerska
Ukrainian defense tech companies will be focusing on domestic missile production, drone swarms, and AI technologies in 2025 as Ukraine seeks to remain one step ahead of Russia in the race to innovate, writes Nataliia Kushnerska.
UkraineAlert
Dec 19, 2024
Five things Russia’s invasion has taught the world about Ukraine
By
Peter Dickinson
Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine has thrust the country into the global spotlight and transformed international perceptions of Ukraine in ways that will resonate for decades to come, writes Peter Dickinson.
UkraineAlert
Jan 2, 2025
Lithuania prioritizes defense spending amid growing Russian threat
By
Agnia Grigas
Lithuania’s new government is planning to increase defense spending as the Baltic nation faces up to the growing threat posed by Putin’s Russia amid uncertainty over the US role in European security, writes Agnia Grigas.
The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.
The Eurasia Center’s mission is to enhance transatlantic cooperation in promoting stability, democratic values and prosperity in Eurasia, from Eastern Europe and Turkey in the West to the Caucasus, Russia and Central Asia in the East.
Follow us on social media
and support our work
The post Putin’s peace plan is actually a call for Ukraine’s capitulation appeared first on Atlantic Council.
Dr. Vivek Murthy served two terms as U.S. Surgeon General—first under former President Obama, then under President Biden. During his tenure, Murthy was a calm and reassuring voice during COVID-19, one of the biggest health challenges the country has faced in recent years.
But most of the time, the “nation’s doctor” highlighted public-health issues that usually fly under the radar: loneliness, gun violence, the dangers of social media, overwhelming parental stress.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
As he prepares to leave office, Murthy wrote a “parting prescription” for the country, reflecting what he feels Americans need most to become healthier and happier. In an interview (lightly edited for clarity and length), Murthy shared with TIME his learnings and his hopes for the health of the nation.
TIME: Is a “parting prescription” a tradition for Surgeon Generals to leave behind?
Murthy: It’s not a tradition that I’m aware of. But for me, this was important to do. I realized over two terms that there were critical questions I have been grappling with. What was driving the deeper pain, the unhappiness I was seeing for years across the country?
I wanted to lay out some of the answers I have found and the path I hope we can travel down as a country to help us be healthier, happier, and more fulfilled. To me, this is the synthesis of the most important learnings that I have taken away from conversations with people all across the country, and from science and research that I have seen over my two terms.
In your prescription, you focus on the need to rebuild a sense of community. How do you define community?
Community is a place where we have relationships, help each other, and where we find purpose in each other. Those three elements are the core pillars of community. Community is also a place fueled by a core virtue: that’s love, which manifests in generosity, kindnesses, and courage. When you put these together, then you have a place where people find a sense of belonging and meaning.
What I have found over my two terms is that for many people, that sense of community has eroded. We have millions of Americans struggling with loneliness: a third of adults and half of young people. People’s participation in both formal and informal service remains low. And more than half of young adults in a recent survey said they felt either low or no sense of meaning and purpose in their lives.
To me, these are all red flags. They are warning signs telling us that the fundamental elements we need to live fulfilling lives are vanishing and getting weaker. If we don’t do something about them, it may not matter that we have the best policy proposals or are making big financial investments in communities. People won’t thrive the way they need to.
What effect does that have on the public’s health?
As community is deteriorating or diminishing in people’s lives, we are starting to see many different manifestations of that. Some involve mental health; others are physical-health related. We are also seeing that when people struggle with loneliness and isolation, it impacts their productivity and engagement at work, and also how kids do in school. When community is weak, we are more easily polarized, divided, and turned against each other.
There is a lot of frustration and even anger now about inequities and barriers in the U.S. health care system, from drug pricing to coverage, as evidenced by the reaction to the fatal shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO. How do we address those challenges?
One of the biggest challenges in any job, including a job like the Surgeon General, is picking which issues to focus on. We had to make some tough choices at the beginning about how to pick among many worthy issues.
My thinking has been, where are we uniquely as an office positioned to be able to pull back the curtain on an issue, work out a strategy, and solve a problem? Where can our voice make a unique contribution?
Read More: Even Small Amounts of Alcohol Can Cause Cancer, Surgeon General Says
I saw very clearly in my first term that mental health was a profound challenge for the country, and it continued to get worse, particularly for young people. I knew coming into the second term that while COVID-19 was a major public-health emergency, the pandemic would make the mental-health struggles we were seeing even worse—so we needed to focus on that as much as possible.
Part of what I tried to do was widen the lens through which we look at health by recognizing that mental health and social health are also part our well-being and impact each other, as well as our physical health. If we want people to be healthy and want to support their well-being, we’ve got to understand and support all three dimensions.
You oversaw one of the biggest public health threats in our country’s history. Have any lessons from COVID-19 changed U.S. health care for the better?
We learned a lot from the pandemic. The government learned a lot about how to produce and distribute vaccines much more rapidly than we thought perhaps ever possible. We learned how to work with industry to rapidly develop treatments and get them out to people.
Where I have the greatest concern is that what we saw during the pandemic was that health misinformation spread rapidly, and many people didn’t know who to trust. But what we did find was that trust in friends, family members, and individual doctors, nurses, and local health departments often remained healthy, even though trust in larger institutions may have eroded.
Read More: 10 Questions to Ask Yourself at the Start of a New Year
To me, that means we have to invest a lot more in doing the hard work to build local connections between doctors, nurses, local health departments and hospitals, and the communities they serve. Those local relationships are going become central to future pandemics, where misinformation will likely continue to swirl online. A lot of that is contingent on both the government and private sector being able to get accurate information out to people in a timely and trustworthy way.
How can health officials rebuild the public’s trust in science and health institutions?
We have to ask ourselves how we can do better so people don’t feel judged when they have a different point of view, and how we can be even more transparent with the reasoning behind decisions or recommendations. How do we build a stronger relationship with the public, and how do we do that not just during a crisis but in between?
When we have a relationship with the public, they come to know people in institutions, how an institution functions, and how it makes decisions. It doesn’t guarantee that people will trust them, but it increases the chances significantly that when you do have a crisis, even if people disagree with a recommendation, they understand why you did it and are at least open to hearing about the reasoning behind the process.
How can we as a country start to build community?
When people are not invested in each other, it makes it hard to come together and advocate for and support the policy solutions that we need. If I don’t have children, and don’t know people who have children—or if I’m not caring for an aging parent or don’t know people who are—then I won’t go out to advocate for safer schools and home care. But if I am connected to my neighbors, friends, and family, then their concerns become my concerns.
What’s next for you after you leave the Surgeon General’s office?
I don’t 100% know what I’m going to do next. What I do know for sure is that the issues I worked on over the last two terms—and in particular, the question of how we rebuild community and the social fabric of our country and the world—will remain central issues to me. I see these as issues we have to address if we want to make the world more hospitable and more nourishing for our kids.
I asked my kids, who are 6 and 8, what I should do after being Surgeon General. It probably says something about me that I’m looking for career advice from a 6 and 8 year old. They looked at me and smiled and said, ‘Papa, we think you should spend more time playing with us.’ I thought that was the right advice.
Read More: What Makes a Friendship Last Forever?
I find myself learning a lot by watching my kids. I find that kids, especially when they are really young, tend to be authentic, vulnerable, and also kind and generous. They also tend have an appreciation for the simple wonders in life. I realized that those are the things I want to recenter my life on as well. I want to rediscover the wonder of the simple things in life. I want to experience gratitude more and more in my day-to-day life. I want to figure out how to cultivate more generosity, love, and kindness in my own life—and figure out how to support and nurture that in world around me.
There are a lot of big challenges we face as a country. But I think these moments of great change and uncertainty can also be powerful moments for us to ask the question: how can we live better lives, how can we make changes to create a better world for our children? Those are the questions I want us to grapple with now. If we do that, then I feel very optimistic that we have what it takes to create a community all us deeply need in our lives, and ultimately help us find the fulfillment we all seek.
The Department of Defense added Chinese electric vehicle battery maker CATL—which Ford Motor Company has partnered with on a billion-dollar EV project in Michigan—to a list of companies that actively aid China’s military.
The Pentagon published documents Tuesday designating CATL and 133 other companies to its Section 1260H list of Chinese military companies, which the Department of Defense is required to update on an annual basis.
Lawmakers, security experts, and former federal officials have warned for years that the China-based CATL maintains strong ties to the Chinese Communist Party infrastructure even as the firm continues to develop a high-profile EV project with Ford in Michigan.
CATL’s inclusion on the list is another black eye for both Ford’s struggling EV business and Democrats’ climate ambitions—the Ford-CATL project was made possible by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D., Mich.), whose administration helped fund it with nearly $2 billion in direct subsidies and tax breaks. It is the latest evidence of the Chinese government’s stranglehold on global green energy supply chains.
“There is no such thing as a private company in China, and I am encouraged to see that the Pentagon has updated its 1260H list to include Chinese military companies active on U.S. soil,” Rep. John Moolenaar (R., Mich.), who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, told the Washington Free Beacon.
“The Select Committee has highlighted these companies because they work with or are affiliated with the Chinese military and are active threats to American security,” he continued. “We cannot allow these loaded guns to threaten our economy and security, and the Select Committee will continue to be a watchdog for the American people in the new Congress.”
Neither Ford nor Whitmer’s office responded to requests for comment.
The action Tuesday comes nearly two years after Ford announced its partnership with CATL alongside Whitmer. Ford pledged in February 2023 to invest $3.5 billion in the Marshall, Mich., factory, saying the plant would create 2,500 jobs and have a battery manufacturing capacity of 35 gigawatt-hours. Ford downsized the project months later amid declining consumer demand for EVs.
While CATL is not a state-owned business, Chinese investors tied to the Chinese Communist Party hold financial stakes in the company, the New York Times reported in 2021. The Chinese government has also taken strategic steps over the last decade to bolster CATL and other major EV companies based in China.
In addition, Zeng Yuqun, who founded CATL in 2012 and remains its top executive, was identified in 2023 as a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) National Committee. According to a U.S. report published in 2018, the committee is a “critical coordinating body” that brings together representatives of Chinese interest groups and is led by the CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee.
The CPPCC National Committee once highlighted Yuqun’s work with CATL fortifying China’s lithium supply chains, which are crucial for electric vehicle production and other green energy development.
“I applaud the Department of the Defense for taking the necessary step to provide for our common defense by formally declaring PRC-based and CCP-tied CATL a Chinese Military Company, as it presents a national security threat to the United States of America,” former United States ambassador Joseph Cella, a cofounder of the Michigan-China Economic and Security Review Group, told the Free Beacon.
“Unconscionably, Governor Whitmer refused to perform the most basic of strict scrutiny and due diligence as directed by our national security and intelligence agencies before spending billions of Michigan taxpayer dollars on this corrupted ‘deal,'” Cella added.
“This should also be a wake-up call to any governor across the country who might be neck deep in seemingly benign business ‘deals’ with PRC-based and CCP-tied companies that are, in fact, engaged in deliberate subnational incursions, political warfare, and espionage.”
The post Ford’s Partner in Billion-Dollar Michigan EV Factory Is a Chinese Military Company, Pentagon Says appeared first on .
Categories
