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Russia has requested military assistance from China in Ukraine, US official says

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Russia has requested military assistance from China in Ukraine, US official says

Potential help from the Chinese language could be a big growth in Russia’s invasion, and will upend the maintain Ukrainian forces nonetheless have within the nation.

When requested by CNN in regards to the reporting of Russia’s request for navy help, Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese language embassy within the US, mentioned in a press release, “I’ve by no means heard of that.”

Liu expressed concern for “the Ukraine state of affairs” — calling it “certainly disconcerting” — and mentioned China has and can proceed to offer humanitarian help to Ukraine.

Liu mentioned: “The excessive precedence now’s to forestall the tense state of affairs from escalating and even getting uncontrolled. … China requires exercising utmost restraint and stopping a large humanitarian disaster.”

The Russian embassy within the US didn’t instantly reply to CNN’s request for remark.

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Information of Russia’s request comes earlier than White Home nationwide safety adviser Jake Sullivan will meet together with his Chinese language counterpart, Yang Jiechi, in Rome on Monday as a part of a follow-up dialog to President Joe Biden and Chinese language President Xi Jinping’s digital assembly final November, in line with Nationwide Safety Council spokesperson Emily Horne.

Sullivan advised Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that China offering Russia with assist is a “concern.”

“We are also watching carefully to see the extent to which China truly does present any type of assist, materials assist or financial assist, to Russia. It’s a concern of ours. And we’ve communicated to Beijing that we’ll not stand by and permit any nation to compensate Russia for its losses from the financial sanctions,” Sullivan mentioned.

Russia expanded its offensive to western Ukraine on Sunday, firing missiles close to the town of Lviv and hitting a big navy base near the Polish border, reportedly killing dozens of individuals because the warfare attracts nearer to NATO’s territory.

Native authorities say 35 individuals had been killed and 134 injured on the navy base, in what Ukraine’s Minister of Defence Oleksii Reznikov described as a “terrorist assault” on peace and safety “close to the EU-NATO border.”

US officers, together with White Home press secretary Jen Psaki, have been more and more important of Beijing’s response to Russia’s warfare in Ukraine. Whereas Beijing has seemingly tried to strike a impartial tone on the worldwide stage, Chinese language home media protection has promoted Russian disinformation campaigns and described the warfare as a “particular navy operation.” Psaki additionally tweeted Wednesday that Beijing “has seemingly endorsed” false Russian claims that the US is creating chemical weapons in Ukraine.

“Our evaluation proper now’s that (China is) abiding by the necessities which have been put in place, however we might proceed to encourage any nation to assume rather a lot about what place they need to — what function they need to play — in historical past as all of us look again,” Psaki mentioned throughout a information convention Wednesday.

Sullivan advised Bash on Sunday that the US has made it clear to Beijing that there’ll “completely be penalties” for “large-scale” efforts to offer the Kremlin a workaround to US sanctions.

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“We is not going to permit that to go ahead and permit there to be a lifeline to Russia from these financial sanctions from any nation anyplace on this planet,” he mentioned.

Nonetheless, Sullivan mentioned that whereas the US believes “China, in truth, was conscious earlier than the invasion occurred that Vladimir Putin was planning one thing, they could not have understood the complete extent of it.”

“As a result of it is very attainable that Putin lied to them the identical approach that he lied to Europeans and others,” Sullivan advised Bash.

Whereas US officers have made word that China has been abiding by the sanctions the US and its allies have imposed towards Russia, Biden mentioned not too long ago he was not ready to debate his efforts to strain China to assist isolate Russia over the Kremlin’s bloody warfare.

“I am not ready to touch upon that for the time being,” Biden advised reporters on the White Home in February.

Biden has usually talked about his conversations with Xi, continuously recalling the handfuls of hours the 2 leaders spent with one another after they had been serving as their nation’s vice presidents. In his speeches, Biden usually likes to recall eating with Xi on the Tibetan Plateau and describing the US in a single phrase: “potentialities.”

Throughout the face-to-face assembly in Rome, Sullivan and Yang will even talk about points that Biden and Xi went over throughout their digital name final yr, sources accustomed to the matter say. The sources added that this assembly has been within the works for a while, they usually do not anticipate any concrete outcomes from it.

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Since taking workplace, Biden has pressured he believes the US is at an inflection level in its historical past and should present the world democracies can compete with autocratic regimes like China’s.

“To compete for the most effective jobs of the long run, we additionally must degree the enjoying discipline with China and different rivals,” Biden mentioned at his first State of the Union handle earlier this month.

Throughout the three-hour summit together with his Chinese language counterpart roughly 4 months in the past, Biden raised issues about human rights, Chinese language aggression towards Taiwan and commerce points. The Biden administration has been clear managing competitors with China is a long-term nationwide safety and financial precedence of the US.

“How the US, Europe, and Asia work collectively to safe the peace and defend our shared values and advance our prosperity throughout the Pacific shall be among the many most consequential efforts we undertake,” Biden mentioned on the Munich safety convention final yr.

Whereas in Rome, Sullivan can be anticipated to fulfill with Luigi Mattiolo, diplomatic adviser to the Italian Prime Minister; the 2 males will talk about ongoing efforts to reply to the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine, in line with Horne’s assertion.

Nuclear escalation menace

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In the meantime, Sullivan advised CNN on Sunday that whereas the Biden administration is “involved about the potential of escalation,” with respect to Putin’s nuclear posture, “we’ve not seen something that will require us to alter our nuclear posture at the moment.”

“We’re watching this extraordinarily carefully, and clearly, the escalation danger with a nuclear energy is extreme, and it’s a totally different form of battle than different conflicts the American individuals have seen through the years,” he mentioned on “State of the Union.”

Nonetheless, Sullivan stood by the administration’s determination to reject a Polish provide to switch fighter jets to Ukraine by means of the US and a German air base.

“The President listened to the evaluation of his intelligence group, he listened to the recommendation of his navy commanders, he consulted his NATO allies, and he in the end decided that the risk-benefit evaluation of flying planes from NATO bases into contested airspace over Ukraine didn’t make sense, was not one thing that he would authorize,” he mentioned, including the US is concentrated on offering “different anti-air techniques that would assist the Ukrainians make progress by way of coping with the menace that’s coming from the air from the Russian aspect.”

The nationwide safety adviser additionally reiterated feedback from Biden earlier this week that Russia “would pay a extreme value” in the event that they selected to make use of chemical or organic weapons in Ukraine, including that Russia’s accusations towards Ukraine making ready to deploy chemical weapons “is a inform, a inform that they themselves could also be making ready to take action after which attempting to pin the blame on somebody else– that is a basic web page out of the Russian playbook.”

This story has been up to date with extra response and background info.

CNN’s Donald Judd, Jasmine Wright, Betsy Klein and Kylie Atwood contributed to this report.

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Russia launches Christmas Day attack on Ukraine’s energy system

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Russia launches Christmas Day attack on Ukraine’s energy system

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Russia has carried out a Christmas Day attack on Ukraine’s energy system, leaving more than half a million people without heating, water and electricity. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the attack, the 13th large-scale assault of 2024 on the country’s grid, was “deliberate” and not a coincidence. “What could be more inhuman?” he wrote on X.

About 50 of the 70 missiles fired in the attack were intercepted, along with a “significant” portion of the more than 100 attack drones deployed, he added.

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This year Ukrainians marked Christmas Day on December 25 for the second time, after switching to the western Gregorian calendar last year. The decision to stop celebrating Christmas on January 7 in line with the Orthodox calendar was made by Kyiv to break with Russian influence.

Oleh Syniehubov, governor of Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region, told Ukraine’s national television news that the attack had left more than 500,000 people without heating, water and electricity.

Temperatures across Ukraine are around freezing point.

Heating supplies were also cut in some areas of Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions, in the west and south of the country. 

Ukraine’s energy grid operator, Ukrenergo, urged consumers to limit consumption by not switching on multiple appliances at once, adding that the system was still recovering from the previous Russian attack on December 13.

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Ukraine’s largest private energy company, DTEK, said that its power stations had been damaged and one of its long-term employees killed.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andriy Sybiha, said on X that the attack reflects Russian President Vladimir Putin’s response to “those who spoke about illusionary ‘Christmas ceasefire’”.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said last week that Zelenskyy had rejected his proposal for a ceasefire and prisoner exchange on the January 7 Orthodox Christmas.

Ukraine denied that such a proposal was ever on the table, asking Hungary to “refrain from manipulations” regarding the war. On Friday, Heorhii Tykhyi, spokesperson for Ukraine’s foreign ministry, described it as “PR, a move” by Orbán.

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American Airlines lifts ground stop that froze Christmas Eve travelers

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American Airlines lifts ground stop that froze Christmas Eve travelers

An American Airlines agent talks to a customer at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, Ill., last week. On Tuesday, the airline issued a national halt to flights.

Kamil Krzacznski/AFP via Getty Images


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Kamil Krzacznski/AFP via Getty Images

American Airlines passengers across the U.S. endured a sudden disruption of service on Christmas Eve, as a “technical issue” forced the airline to request a nationwide ground stop of its operations.

“The ground stop has now been lifted,” the Federal Aviation Administration told NPR shortly after 8 a.m. ET.

On Facebook and X, passengers shared stories of boarding planes early on Christmas Eve — only to be left waiting on the tarmac. In some cases, they described being told the flight would return to its gate so everyone onboard could deplane.

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The ground stop lasted for about one hour, according to the airline.

 “We sincerely apologize to our customers for the inconvenience this morning,” the airline said.

In a statement sent to NPR, American says the widespread delays were caused by a “vendor technology issue” affecting systems that are needed for a flight to be “released” — one of the final key steps before a plane takes off from an airport.

Early circumstances around Tuesday’s outage seemed ominous, reminding travelers of a nightmare scenario that played out two years ago when computer problems fueled a meltdown for Southwest Airlines as it tried to cope with bad weather during the holidays.

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Southwest stranded millions of travelers — and was later ordered to pay a $140 million civil penalty.

Aviation industry veterans like George Hamlin, a consultant, notes that Southwest took the brunt of the blame for the meltdown — but, he adds, “now we’re finding out that it’s a larger, more endemic problem than that.”

Delayed American Airlines passengers who posted to social media Tuesday said pilots blamed the slowdown on a computer system that aims to ensure an optimal center of gravity by balancing planes’ cargo weight and other factors.

Winter weather also threatens to snarl Christmas Eve travel, including storms along the East and West Coasts of the U.S.

The FAA’s operations page shows nearly a dozen airports were deicing planes Tuesday morning, including at Philadelphia International, and Dulles International and Reagan National outside Washington, D.C.

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If you’re flying, the FAA recommends checking your airline’s flight status updates for potential delays. As of 9 a.m. ET, the FlightAware website’s “Misery Map” showed some 544 flights had been delayed and five canceled since 6 a.m. Nearly 120 of those delays were at Charlotte, N.C.’s, airport.

Nearly 12.7 million passengers are expected to fly on American Airlines this winter holiday season, comprising more than 118,000 flights, according to the airline. The most-traveled days in that span are both Fridays, ahead of and just after Christmas.

NPR’s Joel Rose contributed reporting.

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Private equity payouts fell 50% short in 2024

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Private equity payouts fell 50% short in 2024

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Private equity funds cashed out just half the value of investments they typically sell in 2024, the third consecutive year payouts to investors have fallen short because of a deal drought.

Buyout houses typically sell down 20 per cent of their investments in any given year, but industry executives forecast that cash payouts for the year would be about half that figure.

Cambridge Associates, a leading adviser to large institutions on their private equity investments, estimated that funds had fallen about $400bn short in payments to their investors over the past three years compared with historical averages.

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The data underline the increasing pressure on firms to find ways to return cash to investors, including by exiting more investments in the year ahead.

Firms have struggled to strike deals at attractive prices since early 2022, when rising interest rates caused financing costs to soar and corporate valuations to fall.

Dealmakers and their advisers expect that merger and acquisition activity will accelerate in 2025, potentially helping the industry work through what consultancy Bain & Co. has called a “towering backlog” of $3tn in ageing deals that must be sold in the years ahead.

Several large public offerings this year including food transport giant Lineage Logistics, aviation equipment specialist Standard Aero and dermatology group Galderma have provided private equity executives with confidence to take companies public, while Donald Trump’s election has added to Wall Street exuberance.

But Andrea Auerbach, global head of private investments at Cambridge Associates, cautioned that the industry’s issues could take years to work through.

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“There is an expectation that the wheels of the exit market will start to turn. But it doesn’t end in one year, it will take a couple of years,” Auerbach said.

Private equity firms have used novel tactics to return cash to investors while holdings have proved difficult to sell.

They have made increasing use of so-called continuation funds — where one fund sells a stake in one or more portfolio companies to another fund to another fund the firm manages — to engineer exits.

Jefferies forecasts that there will be $58bn of continuation fund deals in 2024, representing a record 14 per cent of all private equity exits. Such funds made up just 5 per cent of all exits in the boom year of 2021, Jefferies found.

But some private equity investors are sceptical that the industry will be able to sell assets at prices close to funds’ current valuations.

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“You have a huge amount of capital that has been invested on assumptions that are no longer valid,” a large industry investor told the Financial Times.

They warned that a record $1tn-plus in buyouts were struck in 2021, just before interest rates rose, and many deals are carried on firms’ books at overly optimistic valuations.

Goldman Sachs recently noted in a report that private equity asset sales, which had historically been done at a premium of at least 10 per cent to funds’ internal valuations, have in recent years been made at discounts of 10-15 per cent.

“[Private] equity in general is still over-marked, which is leading to this situation where assets are still stuck,” said Michael Brandmeyer of Goldman Sachs Asset Management in the report.

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