THE WAR ROOM: President Trump came away from a meeting in Florida yesterday with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky reporting progress on a peace deal for the Ukraine war but admitting that “thorny issues” remain. He even said he would be willing to go to Ukraine to try to convince their parliament to vote for ceding territory to Russia. “I really believe we are by far closer than ever before,” Trump said.

  One sticking point is control of the eastern Donbas region, a portion of which remains in Ukrainian hands. Russia is trying to take the rest of it through negotiations. Another issue is control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant which used to supply about 25 percent of Ukraine’s electricity and is now deep in in Russian occupied territory.

  Ukraine is looking for security guarantees to prevent another Russian invasion and commitments to rebuild devastated towns and cities.

  Any peace deal would have to meet Russia approval and they’ve shown no sign of wanting one despite Trump’s conversations with Vladimir Putin, as late as yesterday. They spoke on the phone for 2 ½ hours. The talks in Florida came after Russia’s longest sustained assault on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, 10 hours of attacks by missiles and drones on energy and civilian infrastructure leaving many residents without heat.

DRUGGED OUT: President Trump said during a radio interview last Friday that the US  had knocked out “a big facility” in Venezuela last week last week as part of his campaign against drug trafficking coming out of that country. Although Trump did not describe the facility, The NY Times reports that American officials tell them Trump was referring to a drug facility that had been eliminated.

  Trump mentioned the attack during an interview with John Catsimatidis, the Republican billionaire and Trump supporter who owns WABC radio in New York. The two men were discussing the US military campaign to disrupt drug trafficking from Latin America by striking boats suspected of carrying narcotics.

  Whatever was hit was not mentioned in any official announcement. “They have a big plant or a big facility where the ships come from,” Mr. Trump said. “Two nights ago we knocked that out.” If true, it would be America’s first land strike against Venezuela’s drug trade and the reign of Nicolas Maduro.

DOWNHILL RACER: American skiing phenomenon Mikaela Shiffrin won her 6^th straight World Cup slalom race yesterday, further solidifying her position as the winningest skier of all time and a candidate for gold at the Olympics in February. This was Shiffrin’s 106^th win.

  Shiffrin was in 4^th place after her first run in Semmering, Austria, but made up more than a 2-second deficit in her second run to edge out Switzerland’s Camille Rast by 0.09 seconds.

  Shiffrin is not the only female phenom. Lindsey Vonn at age 41 and skiing on a partially artificial knee has qualified for the Cortina Olympics in both the downhill and Super-G. It will be her 5^thOlympics.  

THE OBIT PAGE: Brigitte Bardot, the French actress whose bedroom hair and pouty lips made her the definition of sex appeal in the 1950s starting with her role in the movie “And God Created Woman,” only to give up stardom to devote herself to animal welfare, died at home in southern France. She was 91.

  Bardot was only 23 when she was launched to international fame in the movie directed by her husband at the time, Roger Vadim. She became far better known than the movies she made.

  Over time she drifted from the image of sexual liberality to the conservative political far right. She was convicted multiple times in France for “inciting racial hatred.”

  As an animal welfare activist she campaigned against wolf hunting, bullfighting, vivisection, and the consumption of horse meat. Her Fondation Brigitte Bardot based in Paris is credited with working in 70 countries and taking in more than. 12,000 animals. Bardot married four times. “I gave my beauty and my youth to men,” she was quoted as saying when she quit acting in 1973, “and now I am giving my wisdom and experience, the best of me, to animals.” 

THE SPIN RACK: Arkansas lottery officials say that someone bought a winning Powerball ticket, worth $1.817 billion at a gas station off Highway 67 in the small city of Cabot. — Two small helicopters collided over southern New Jersey yesterday, killing one person and critically injuring another. —  Vince Zampella, a co-creator of the “Call of Duty” video game franchise and another person were killed Saturday in the crash of a red 2026 Ferrari on LA’s Angeles Crest Highway. The crash was caught on video showing the car speeding out of a tunnel, hitting the guardrail, flipping and bursting into flame. Zampella was 55. — An Oklahoma man who gave himself a gun for Christmas is facing charges after doing target practice in his back yard hitting and killing a woman several blocks away. — The Kennedy Center says it plans to file a $1 million lawsuit against jazz musician Chuck Redd, who canceled his annual Christmas Eve performance because President Trump’s name had been put on the building. — A lone skier was captured on video Saturday skiing down Sicily’s Mt. Aetna as the snow-covered Volcano erupted behind him. 

BELOW THE FOLD: Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she believes Democrats will win the House majority next year. As Joe Biden might say, “And I’m not joking.”