Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is in Washington urging Congress to unfreeze badly needed military aid. The debate over U.S. aid comes as a declassified intelligence assessment details staggering losses for Russia. It shows nearly 90 percent of its pre-war force has been killed or wounded in Ukraine.
《Ukraine is also concerned that Hungary is on the verge this week of blocking tens of billions of dollars of European aid; And Ukraine is concerned that it won't be able to pay its bills. Its government needs $4 billion a month just to pay its bills; it's important to note that the Pentagon says it still has $900 million worth of funds that it could use to replenish for weapons that it can still send to Ukraine today, even if Congress doesn't pass that aid; the president, as well as the White House, has made clear time and time again that if additional funding is not passed by Congress, then the money that they currently have allocated for Ukraine, it runs out at the end of the year; 》

The UN General Assembly approved a measure calling for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. The U.S. was one of ten nations to vote against the non-binding resolution. Before the vote, President Biden said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to change his hardline government, adding that Israel is losing global support due to its “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza. Geoff Bennett reports.

Cheaper gas helped ease inflation in November, House Republicans moved to set a vote on formalizing their impeachment inquiry into President Biden, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley received a key endorsement in New Hampshire and Claudine Gay will remain president of Harvard after a backlash over her congressional testimony on campus antisemitism.
《The Labor Department's Consumer Price Index edged up just one-tenth of a percent last month from October. On a year-to-year basis, the rate dropped slightly to 3.1 percent from the previous November; Governor Chris Sununu is expected to come out for Haley. He's been a vocal critic of former President Donald Trump; In Pakistan, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a police station today, killing at least 23 people. A Taliban offshoot claimed responsibility; Google will appeal a federal jury verdict in San Francisco that found its android App Store operates as an illegal monopoly. Epic Games argued the system quashes competitors and ultimately hurts smartphone users;クローディン・ゲイ;  》

As the COP28 climate conference comes to a close, countries are racing against the clock. More than 100 nations are pushing for a firm commitment to stop the use of coal, oil and gas after earlier drafts advocated for eventually phasing out fossil fuels. Geoff Bennett discussed more with Michael Mann, one of the climate experts critical of what’s happened at the summit.
《Michael Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania; he wrote an op-ed in The L.A. Times, saying that not only has COP 28 failed to meet this moment demanding dramatic and immediate climate action, it has made a caricature of it; first of all, the host country, United Arab Emirates, is a fossil fuel state. It's a petro state. And the president of COP 28, appointed by the host, is, in fact, an oil executive; the president of COP 28 has been using language claiming that there's no science to back up the need to phase out fossil fuels, when, of course, the science overwhelmingly indicates we have to bring carbon emissions down dramatically to avert catastrophic warming; we resist calls to dissolve the entire COP process, because, as you just said, it is the only multilateral framework we have for global climate negotiations... What we do need is to mend it, not end it; We argue, for example, that we can't allow a single country like Saudi Arabia to prevent the agreement from passing. And so there should be something instead like a supermajority; 75 percent of participating countries have to agree to a particular resolution for it to pass; In the past, the enforcement mechanism was called name and shame... But some of these countries, like Saudi Arabia, have shown they have no shame. And so there need to be real penalties for bad actors who essentially are trying to prevent any meaningful progress from taking place; We're not talking about sort of stopping all fossil fuel production cold turkey. What we're talking about is a steady transition, bringing carbon emissions down 50 percent this decade, bringing them down to zero by mid-century. And we have the technology to do that, renewable energy, solar, wind, geothermal. We don't need new technology. We just need the political will to make this transition; 》

An investigation into Chinese fishing fleets and processing centers has discovered that seafood produced with forced labor is making its way to American dinner tables. That's despite a U.S. ban on imports made by workers from China’s Xinjiang province. That region is home to Muslim minority Uyghurs who have been the victims of well-documented human rights violations. John Yang reports.
《An investigation by the not-for-profit journalism organization called The Outlaw Ocean Project has documented human rights, labor, and environmental concerns related to the Chinese fleet; Ian Urbina, founder and executive editor of of The Outlaw Ocean Project; The Uyghurs are a Muslim minority in China; there's this general policy from the Chinese government to try to relocate many of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and disperse them elsewhere in the country to sort of pacify the population, if you will. So there's a huge state-run labor transfer program with thousands of Uyghurs that are forcibly removed from this inland province, Xinjiang, and transported 2,000 miles away to the other side of the country to work in the factories; China's fishing fleet is in many ways sort of an arm of its geopolitical agenda. It's sort of a projection of power. And so, if you look at places like the South China Sea, contested waters in that area, the fishing fleet is essentially acting as a civilian militia; 》

Four women are suing hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs over sexual assault allegations dating back to the early 90s. Previously, those lawsuits couldn’t have been filed because of the statute of limitations. But most were filed under a New York state law that allowed survivors a one-year window to sue for past abuse. Amna Nawaz discussed more with attorney Mariann Wang and Sidney Madden of NPR.
《Adult Survivors Act; we know one of those lawsuits was filed by R&B singer Casandra Ventura. She's known as Cassie, the former girlfriend of Sean "Diddy" Combs; it's something that takes years to understand and get healthy from and get to a place where you actually feel like maybe you can pursue something and can face this perpetrator again in court. It's not an easy thing, and I think the public and the legislators should understand that, and that should be reflected in extending or even eliminating statutes of limitations; 》

Hanukkah is Judaism’s celebration of finding light in the darkness. But for some Jewish Americans, this year’s celebrations are tempered by the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas and antisemitism concerns closer to home. We hear from people across the country about what Hanukkah means to them and if they are celebrating it differently this year.

Shohei Ohtani’s $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers is the highest in professional team sports in North America. The 29-year-old from Japan dominates in both pitching and hitting and was the American League’s most valuable player this past season. Stephanie Sy discussed the Ohtani phenomenon, his unique contract and what it could mean for baseball with Joe Posnanski.
《it's a $700 million contract that doesn't really begin until 2034. So that's -- it's a very, very strange thing, and it's kind of hard to even get your arms around what it means; the thing that's so amazing about Shohei Ohtani is how driven he is, how driven he is to get better, how driven he is to, as we say, be a part of baseball history; 》