Sat: Was the Yellow Knight Yellow?

Wagner Attacks Have 50% Casualty Rates

Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has suffered more than 30,000 casualties since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine last February, with about 9,000 of those fighters killed in action, the United States has claimed.

The US estimates that 90 percent of Wagner Group fighters killed in Ukraine since December 2022 were convicts, White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters at a regular briefing on Friday.

Half of the overall deaths among Wagner mercenaries have occurred since mid-December, as fighting in Ukraine’s eastern city of Bakhmut intensified, according to US intelligence.

Kirby said the mercenary group had made incremental gains in and around Bakhmut over the last few days but those advances had taken many months to achieve and came at a “devastating cost that is not sustainable”.

“It is possible that they may end up being successful in Bakhmut but it will prove of no real worth to them because it is of no real strategic value,” he said, adding that Ukrainian forces would maintain strong defensive lines across the Donbas region.

Kirby told reporters that Wagner continued to rely heavily on convicts, who were sent to war without training or equipment, despite recent comments from Wagner’s founder Yevgeny Prigozhin that he had stopped recruiting Russian prisoners to fight in Ukraine.

When They Say a Prisoner is "Put on Ice", I Don't Think This is What They Mean

A mentally ill man froze to death at an Alabama jail, according to a lawsuit filed by the man’s family who say he was kept naked in a concrete cell and believe he was also placed in a freezer or other frigid environment.

Anthony Don Mitchell, 33, arrived at a hospital emergency room with a body temperature of 72 degrees (22 degrees Celsius), and was pronounced dead hours later, according to the lawsuit. He was brought to the hospital on Jan. 26 from the Walker County Jail, where he’d been incarcerated for two weeks.

An emergency room doctor, who tried unsuccessfully to revive Mitchell, wrote, “I do believe hypothermia was the ultimate cause of his death,” according to the lawsuit filed Monday by Mitchell’s mother in federal court.

Mitchell, who had a history of drug addiction, was arrested Jan. 12 after a cousin asked authorities to do a welfare check on him because he was rambling about portals to heaven and hell in his home and appeared to be suffering a mental breakdown.

Jail video shows Mitchell was kept naked in a concrete-floored isolation cell, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit speculates that Mitchell was also placed in the jail kitchen’s “walk-in freezer or similar frigid environment and left there for hours” because his body temperature was so low.

“It is clear that Tony’s death was wrongful, the result of horrific, malicious abuse and mountains of deliberate indifference,” Jon C. Goldfarb, a lawyer representing the family, wrote in the lawsuit. “Numerous corrections officers and medical staff wandered over to his open cell door to spectate and be entertained by his condition.”

The Grey Lady Has Seemed A Little Off Lately. Is It Dementia?

Nearly 1,000 New York Times contributors, in addition to tens of thousands of subscribers and readers of the Times, signed an open letter on Wednesday to the paper’s standards editor condemning the publication’s coverage of transgender, non-binary and gender non-conforming people.

A second letter organized by the nonprofit Glaad (the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) on Wednesday spoke against what it called “irresponsible, biased coverage of transgender people” in the Times.

The Times has asserted that its reporting is nuanced and fair, saying: “GLAAD’s advocacy mission and The Times’s journalistic mission are different.”

“As a news organization, we pursue independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care,” said Charlie Stadtlander, the Times’ director of external communications in a statement that was provided to several media organizations.

In recent months, the Times has published several stories on healthcare for trans youth, as well as opinion pieces on the subject.

The contributors’ letter said that “plenty of reporters at the Times cover trans issues fairly” but criticized the organization and specific reporters for publishing “over 15,000 words of front⁠-⁠page Times coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children” over the past eight months. That letter, signed by 30,000 supporters as of late Friday, includes Chelsea Manning, Cynthia Nixon and Roxane Gay.

Is Coach Prime in His Prime?

Nikki Haley not 'in her prime'? Don Lemon's comments spotlight a political reality for women candidates

CNN anchor Don Lemon on planned paid leave (a paid vacation?) after saying Nikki Haley is not 'in her prime'

CNN anchor Don Lemon's dismissal of Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley has sparked a furor not because his attitude toward women and aging is so unusual. While his comments have been derided as offensive, women in politics say his views remain remarkably common.

At an age male politicians can be viewed as gaining authority as they add gray hairs, female politicians are sometimes seen as hitting their expiration date.

"It's much worse for women, and it hasn't gotten better," said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who has studied the hurdles women face in running for office. The phenomenon isn't limited to politics, she said. In focus groups she has conducted for AARP, women over 50 cite age discrimination as a major concern in all sorts of fields.

Including television news, where age and gender discrimination lawsuits have been filed against local stations complaining that getting older was seen as an asset for male anchors but as a firing offense for female ones.

Stay in the conversation on politics: Sign up for the OnPolitics newsletter

Lemon wandered into the issue on "CNN This Morning" Thursday when he questioned Haley's proposal to mandate mental competency tests for politicians older than 75. "She says people, you know, politicians or something are not in their prime," he said. "Nikki Haley isn't in her prime, sorry. A woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s and 30s and maybe 40s."

When co-host Poppy Harlow pushed back, he suggested Googling the question.

Indeed, type in "What age is women's prime?" on Google and the search engine responds near the top with "the oft-cited narrative that ages 30-39 are a woman's supposed 'prime' – socially, professionally, physically, sexually and emotionally."