jdbalart@msnbc. yasmin vossoughian picks up with more news right now. good to see you. it is thursday morning. i m yasmin vossoughian live for you here at msnbc headquarters in new york city. we got a lot to get to this morning. right now a jolt of good news on the economic front. 12 days out from the midterms which could very well be decided by how voters feel about the economy. the gdp grew more than expected and how the white house is responding to that. new urgency and new questions in two of the most consequential races of the midterms. first in georgia, a new allegation against herschel walker. the antiabortion republican denying a claim from another former girlfriend who came forward anonymous saying he drove her to get an abortion decades ago. i am a registered independent and i voted for donald trump in both elections. i do not believe that herschel walker is fit to be a u.s. senator. walker is firing back, calling the allegation a lie and saying he s done w
energy agency is implementing a, quote, severe and unprecedented emergency power cut in kyiv to avoid a complete blackout. i want to bring in matt mcbradley and jamil jaffer. he served as chief council and senior adviser to the senate foreign relations committee. matt, let me start with you. take us through exactly what we heard from president putin over the last hour or so when it comes to his attentions moving forward in ukraine. reporter: it was another one of the greatest hits speeches from vladimir putin. it s nothing that we haven t heard before. a lot of this stuff is stuff that he s used before as a pretext to this kind of rambling sort of off-topic kind of speech, blaming the west not only for instigating the war in ukraine. he didn t mention ukraine all that much it was he was directly asked about it after the speech