First Thing: Massive majority expected in UN’s demand for Russia to leave Ukraine

Global south countries including China, South Africa and India expected to abstain. Plus, why Starbucks is putting virgin olive oil in coffee

Good morning.

The 193-strong UN general assembly is expected by a massive majority today to endorse a broad resolution demanding Russia unconditionally and immediately withdraw from Ukraine’s territory, but China, South Africa, India and many countries in the global south are likely to continue to abstain, underlining their separation from what they regarded as the west’s war.

The resolution has been the subject of weeks of negotiations and has required Ukraine’s allies in the G7 to persuade Kyiv not to press for very specific wider demands and risk seeing some of the countries that have previously voted for Ukraine’s sovereignty peeling off.

The last time the UN general assembly voted on the issue 143 countries backed Ukraine and only five supported Russia. Ukraine has been warned the number may slip to 135 in today’s vote, marking the first anniversary of the war’s start, but Ukraine and its allies have been involved in last minute high-level lobbying of countries such as Pakistan and India.

In the debate which opened on Wednesday, Belarus tabled an amendment excising any criticism of Russia.

What has the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said ahead of the vote? Speaking yesterday during a special session of the general assembly, Guterres called the anniversary of Moscow’s attack “a grim milestone for the people of Ukraine and for the international community” and condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an “affront to our collective conscience”.

‘Big mistake’: Biden condemns Putin’s withdrawal from nuclear treaty

Joe Biden said Vladimir Putin’s decision to suspend his country’s participation in the last remaining US-Russia nuclear arms control treaty was a “big mistake”.

The comment came as the US president closed out his wartime visit to Europe, working to shore up partnerships with allies on Nato’s perilous eastern flank – even as the Russian president was drawing closer to China for help as his invasion of Ukraine neared the year mark.

Biden’s meeting with leaders of the Bucharest Nine nations in Warsaw came at the conclusion of a whirlwind, four-day visit to Ukraine and Poland meant to reassure allies that US support in fending off Russia is not at risk of waning.

In dramatic counterpoint yesterday, Putin played host in Moscow to Wang Yi, the Chinese Communist party’s most senior foreign policy official, as US intelligence warned that Beijing is considering supplying arms and ammunition to the worn-down Russian military.

What do these flexing of alliances indicate? Both sides seem to be digging in for prolonged conflict in Ukraine with the fighting expected to intensify with the arrival of spring.

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner subpoenaed in January 6 investigation – report

The former US president Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump have been subpoenaed by the special counsel Jack Smith to testify before a federal grand jury regarding the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing sources.

Merrick Garland, the attorney general, appointed Smith in November last year to take over two investigations involving Trump, who is running for president in 2024.

The first investigation involves Trump’s handling of highly sensitive classified documents he retained at his Florida resort after leaving the White House in January 2021.

The second investigation is looking at efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election’s results, including a plot to submit phony slates of electors to block Congress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s victory.

Who else has been subpoenaed? Earlier this month, media outlets reported that the former US vice-president Mike Pence, the former national security adviser Robert O’Brien and Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows were subpoenaed by Smith in his investigations.

In other news …

The Pentagon has released a selfie photograph snapped by the pilot of a U2 spy plane that was hurtling through the skies above the Chinese spy balloon as the US military pursued and shot it down off the coast of South Carolina earlier this month. The image shows the the apparatus hanging under the balloon.

The Israeli army launched airstrikes on targets in the Gaza Strip hours after Palestinian militants in the regions fired six rockets towards Israel’s south. The escalation in violence came a day after an Israeli army raid in the occupied West Bank that killed 11.

The 22-year-old accused of carrying out the deadly mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs in November posted to a neo-Nazi website and used gay and racial slurs while gaming online, a police detective testified yesterday. Among the things Anderson Lee Aldrich posted was an image of a rifle scope trained on a gay pride parade.

Search and rescue teams raced to find dozens of people that remained missing after heavy rains devastated coastal areas of Brazil’s south-eastern São Paulo state, as the official death toll rose to 48. Massive downpours have caused landslides and flooding in coastal towns of Brazil’s richest state

Don’t miss this: ‘I cried with her’ – the diary of a doctor navigating a total abortion ban

Dr Leilah Zahedi-Spung alwaysknew providing abortion care in Tennessee was going to be hard, but she probably never could have imagined how hard, writes Poppy Noor. On 25 August 2022, 18 months after Zahedi-Spung landed a dream job as a maternal fetal medicine specialist, the state enacted one of the strictestabortion bansin the country, one that does not even make explicit exceptions to save the life of the pregnant person. At the end of 2022, she started writing a diary for the Guardian, detailing her last days in a busy doctor’s office where she sometimes saw more than 40 patients a day, manybegging her for help she could not give. The diary has been supplemented with interviews, to try and capture what life is like for a doctor whose work is severely restricted due to a total abortion ban.

… Or this: I was vilified as a gay teenager – but Mariah Carey saved me

I was 12 when it happened. Dad was parking the car and we were getting ready for a torturous hour of food shopping, writes Ian Eagleton. Suddenly, over the radio, I heard a voice that today is one of the most recognisable in the world, but at the time it was new to me: a whispery, breathy voice that floated and fluttered over a slinky, laid-back track. It was Mariah Carey and the song was Honey. I instantly fell in love. What a voice! I was in my first year at a boys’ secondary school and things were awful. I grew up in the shadow of section 28, a series of laws across Britain that prohibited the “promotion of homosexuality” in schools. Those heinous laws ensured that kids believed being gay was something to be ashamed of. I was ignored, pushed, shoved, spat at and vilified. Then I discovered Mariah.

Climate check: Huge winter storm closes US highways and prompts rare southern California blizzard warning

A brutal winter storm closed interstate highways from Arizona to Wyoming on Wednesday, trapped drivers in cars, knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of people and prompted the first blizzard warning in southern California in decades – and the worst won’t be over for several days. Few places in the country will be untouched by the wild weather, as some areas prepare for the opposite extreme. Pockets of the south-east will be cooking, with record-breaking warmth expected to stretch into the mid-Atlantic spiking temperatures more than 40F warmer than normal and creating weather that feels more “like June than February”, according to the National Weather Service.

Last Thing: Starbucks launches extra virgin olive oil-infused coffee

Starbucks is once again daring to challenge Italy’s sacred coffee-drinking tradition by blending the beverage with another of the country’s revered food items: olive oil. The Oleato range of drinks, each containing Partanna extra virgin olive oil, launched in Italy yesterday and the US this spring before coming to the UK, Japan and Middle East later this year. The idea came to the Starbucks CEO, Howard Shultz, he said, during a trip to Sicily, where he adopted a daily ritual of taking a spoonful of extra virgin olive oil along with his morning coffee before deciding to experiment by mixing the two together. He said he could not remember a moment in the last 40 years when he’s been “more excited, more enthused”.

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