It's Wednesday morning, what do we know?
Search and rescue comes to an end in Dnipro and China reaches a milestone
What do we know?
The inmates alternatively known as the Republican House conference have begun receiving their committee assignments. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Paul Gosar and Lauren Boebert have all been given seats on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, which is led by Representative James Comer. Like you, I can’t imagine how things could possibly go sideways with this dream quartet at the helm. Greene will also sit on the Homeland Security Committee and Gosar is expected to join the Natural Resources Committee. George Santos released a statement saying he’d been named Emperor of the Nine Realms and Queen of the 2024 Rose Bowl Parade, by which he apparently meant he’d been named to the Committee on Small Business and the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
CPAC head and prominent Trump supporter, Matt Schlapp, is facing a $9.4 million lawsuit for sexual impropriety involving a male staffer who worked for the Herschel Walker campaign. In the suit, the staffer alleges that the married Schlapp came onto him at a bar, tried to get him drunk and then fondled the staffer’s biscuits while he drove Schlapp back to his hotel. When the story originally broke in the Daily Beast, the staffer provided texts from Schlapp as well as proof of contemporaneous conversation about the incident with other members of the Walker teamÂ
China reached a pivotal milestone on Tuesday. The government announced the population decreased in 2022, the first time that's happened in 60 years. The Chinese population shrunk by about 850,000 people last year, part of a decline that’s been going on for decades. 2022 also marked the first time deaths outnumbered births in the country since Mao’s disastrous, famine-inducing Great Leap Forward programs. And the country’s birth rate per 1000 people fell to an anemic 7.52 (by comparison, the U.S. sees 11.06 births per 1000 people). A shrinking, aging Chinese population has massive implications for geopolitics and the global economy
The World Economic Forum is underway in Davos, Switzerland if anyone feels like dropping $75 on a can of Diet Coke and a small salad.  This year’s meeting of the globalist elites (only some of whom are Jewish) has focused on inflation, the threat of a global recession and the war in Ukraine. The Wall Street Journal has a roundup of all the festivities
What do we know in Ukraine?
The search for survivors from the Dnipro apartment building concluded on Tuesday. The Russian missile attack killed 45, including six children, and left another 79 injured. About 230 apartments in the complex were damaged and 72 were completely destroyed by the Russian AS-4 Kitchen anti-ship missile. The choice of an anti-ship missile for the attack, which are not suited to uses beyond their designs and are often imprecise, is an indication that Russian weapons stockpiles are running thin. Russia used the anti-ship missile because they had to, not because they wanted to
The Dutch Prime Minister on Tuesday pledged to supply Ukraine with a Patriot air defense system, joining the U.S., Germany and the Netherlands
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley met face-to-face with his Ukrainian counterpart on Tuesday for the first time. General Milley and Ukraine’s chief military officer, Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, have developed a close working relationship over the course of the war but had not met in person until Tuesday in a Polish town just across the border from UkraineÂ