President-elect Donald Trump said Monday he is naming former Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy as his nominee to be transportation secretary, as he continues to roll out picks for his Cabinet. Duffy is a former reality TV star who was one of Trump’s most visible defenders on cable news — a prime concern for the media-focused president-elect. Duffy served in the House for nearly nine years, was a member of the Financial Services Committee and was chairman of the subcommittee on insurance and housing.

The U.S. will allow Ukraine to use American-supplied longer-range weapons to conduct strikes inside Russian territory, a long-sought request by Kyiv. It was not clear if there would be limits on Ukraine’s use of the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, as there have been on other U.S. missile systems. Their deployment could — at least initially — be limited to Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian troops seized territory earlier this year. Since the first year of the war, Ukrainian leaders have lobbied Western allies to allow them to use advanced weapons to strike key targets inside Russia — a move they hope would erode Moscow’s capabilities before their troops reach the eastern front line and could make it more difficult for them to strike Ukrainian territory.

The IDF announced that a military reservist was killed and three other soldiers were seriously injured in a Hezbollah drone attack in southern Lebanon on Tuesday morning. The fallen soldier was identified as Sgt. First Class (Res.) Omer Moshe Gaeldor hy”d, 30, a member of the Golani Brigade’s logistics unit from Yerushalayim. According to an initial IDF investigation, the incident occurred during a logistics supply operation in southern Lebanon. A drone, armed with explosives and launched by Hezbollah, struck the soldiers, killing Gaeldor and wounding the others. (YWN World Headquarters – NYC)  

President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday formally lowered the threshold for Russia’s use of its nuclear weapons, a move that follows U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to let Ukraine strike targets inside Russian territory with American-supplied longer-range missiles. The new doctrine allows for a potential nuclear response by Moscow even to a conventional attack on Russia by any nation that is supported by a nuclear power. Russia’s Defense Ministry said Ukraine fired six U.S.-made ATACMS missiles early Tuesday at a military facility in Russia’s Bryansk region that borders Ukraine, adding that air defenses shot down five of them and damaged one more.