THE WAR ROOM: Just a day before scheduled peace talks today, Ukraine drone attacks  damaged and destroyed as many as 40 heavy bombers in a daring  drone attack on one of Russia’s critical weapon systems. It is both a strategic and intelligence coup for Ukraine that is reported to have been 18 months in planning.

  “Russia’s military planes are currently burning at the Belaya, Diaghilev, Olenya and Ivanovo airfields,” said an official with Ukraine’s security service yesterday. Ukraine released a video of burning Russian bombers, some of which have been used to launch long-range ballistic missiles into Ukraine.

  But also yesterday, Russia hit a Ukrainian military training base, killing at least 12 people.

  The bombers targeted by included TU-95 “Bear” nuclear bombers, TU-22 “Backfire” fast-attack strike bombers, and A-50 “Mainstay” command-and-control jets according to Ukraine. “Today will later be called the dark day of Russia’s long-range aviation,” Russian military aviation blogger Ilya Tumanov, known as Fighterbomber, said in a Telegram post. “And the day is not over yet.”

  Ukraine says they infiltrated the drones into Russian territory in shipping containers that were opened remotely allowing launches toward five Russian air  bases from eastern Siberia to the far west, thousands of miles from Ukraine. They said that their personnel were out of Russia before the drones launched.

  Also inside Russia, two bridges collapsed in the Kursk and Bryansk regions, both of which border Ukraine, killing eight people and injuring 76.  It was not immediately clear whether this was the result of military action.

MORE WAR: Israeli troops opened fire early yesterday on crowds collecting to receive food in southern Gaza, killing 31 people and wounding 170 others, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry. The Israel Defense Forces said yesterday that it was “currently unaware of injuries caused by IDF fire within the Humanitarian Aid distribution site” and that the matter is under review. 

STREET TERROR: Eight people were burned yesterday in downtown Boulder, Colorado in an attack on members of Run For Their Lives, a group that campaigns every week for Israeli hostages and others held by Hamas militants in Gaza.

  Witnesses said a man who shouted Free Palestine” used a makeshift flamethrower on the victims ages 52 to 88. One man said people were writhing  on the ground.

  The assailant has been identified as a 45-year-old Egyptian man who arrived on Los Angeles in 2022 and overstayed his visitor’s visa.

THE FBI STORY:  FBI Director Kash Patel, who once said he would turn the headquarters building into a museum, is quickly clearing out and reorganizing the upper ranks of management while turning the focus to immigration and what he believes to have be the politicization of the bureau during the Biden administration. He is using lie detector tests to find the source of leaks about investigations and initiatives.

“The director and I will have most of our incoming reform teams in place by next week,” Deputy Director Dan Bongino wrote on social media . Bongino, who was hired away from his work as a firebrand conservative podcaster, said,  “The hiring process can take a little bit of time, but we are approaching that finish line. This will help us both in doubling down on our reform agenda.”

  Senior agents are reported to fear that Patel and Bongino are wiping out institutional knowledge in national security and organized crime. Meanwhile they are re-investigating the two pipe bombs planted during the January 6^th insurrection, which Bongino insisted in his role as a podcaster was an “inside job” by government operators.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE:

— President Trump on Saturday night reposted  on social media a conspiracy theory former President Joe Biden had been “executed in 2020” and replaced by a robotic clone. The post says “#Biden clones doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see. #Democrats don’t know the difference.”

— Nationalist Karol Nawrocki, a historian and former boxer, was elected president of Poland yesterday in an advance for the right wing in Europe. President Trump had endorsed Nawrocki. 

THE OBIT PAGE:  Étienne-Émile Baulieu, the French biochemist and doctor who was a champion of a woman’s right to choose whether she would become a mother and  who was often called the father of the abortion pill, died Friday at home in Paris. He was 98.

  Baulieu’s development in the early 1980s of the synthetic steroid mifepristone, RU-486, blocks  the uterus from receiving progesterone,  preventing a fertilized egg from implanting. Paired with the drug misoprostol, the treatment causes a miscarriage

  Opponents called Baulieu’s  RU-486 a “death pill” and a “chemical coat hanger,” but it is mow the most common method of abortion. 

  “I want to help women,” Baulieu said. “I have not dedicated my life to abortion. I am not anti-children.” 

THE SPIN RACK: — Patricia Krenwinkle, now 77 and the last of two people still in prison from the Charles Manson cult crew that murdered seven people in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, has been recommended for parole after 54 years in prison. She is California’s longest serving female inmate. Charles Watson, 79, is also still in prison. Manson died in prison and others have been released or died. — Two people are dead and a police officer is in a coma in France following nationwide mass celebrations for Paris Saint-Germain winning the Champions League European soccer’s biggest prize. 

BELOW THE FOLD:  A class action lawsuit filed against the Honolulu police department charges that officers arrested sober drivers in order to make their quotas for DUI arrests. Lawyers representing the plaintiffs say they identified 127 drivers who blew an alcohol level of 0.00 on a breathalyzer were detained anyway.

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