Free Republic

Plumes of black smoke were seen on Tuesday at a Russian military airbase near the settlement of Gvardeyskoye in the centre of Russian-controlled Crimea, Russia’s Kommersant newspaper reported. Earlier on Tuesday, Russia’s Defence Ministry separately blamed a series of explosions around Dzhankoi in northern Crimea on “sabotage”, state-owned news agency RIA reported. Ukraine has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement in a recent series of blasts in Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.

Explosions shook an ammunition depot in Russian-annexed Crimea on Tuesday, the latest such incident in a region used by Moscow as a staging post for its war in Ukraine.

Aug 8 (Reuters) - Degrowth - the idea that a finite planet cannot sustain ever-increasing consumption - is about the closest you can get to a heresy in economics, where growth is widely held as the best route to prosperity. But, as climate change accelerates and supply chain disruptions offer rich-world consumers an unaccustomed taste of scarcity, the theory is becoming less taboo and some have started to ponder what a degrowth world might look like. After the U.N. climate science agency this year called for cuts in consumer demand - a core degrowth premise - the think tank that...

Three people were killed by a lightning strike on Thursday just across the street from the White House and Reuters used the sad occasion to hype... climate change. I kid you not as their own headline on Friday reveals: "Washington DC lightning strike that killed three offers climate warning."Reuter's reporter Gloria Dickie then goes into the details of how this tragedy is indicative of climate change starting with the very first sentence of her story:

LONDON (Reuters) - The Ukraine war shows that the West's dominance is coming to an end as China rises to superpower status in partnership with Russia at one of the most significant inflection points in centuries, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said."We are coming to the end of Western political and economic dominance," Blair said in a lecture entitled "After Ukraine, What Lessons Now for Western Leadership?" according to a text of the speech to a forum supporting the alliance between the United States and Europe at Ditchley Park west of London.

NUSA DUA, Indonesia (Reuters) -The United States will look for every opportunity to move ahead and enact a global minimum corporate tax agreement despite the opposition of a key Democratic senator, Joe Manchin, to raising corporate taxes, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said. Yellen told reporters on Saturday that finance officials from the Group of 20 major economies reached strong consensus about many issues, including the need to address a worsening food security crisis, despite differences over Russia's war in Ukraine that prevented the leaders from issuing a joint statement. Manchin, who holds the pivotal vote in the evenly divided...

Turkey has agreed to support Finland's and Sweden's bids for NATO membership, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday (28 June). "I am pleased to announce that we now have an agreement that paves the way for Finland and Sweden to join NATO," he told reporters on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Madrid. "Turkey, Finland and Sweden have signed a memorandum that addresses Turkey's concerns, including around arms exports and the fight against terrorism," he added.

ARIS/BERLIN/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Is it better to engage with Russian President Vladimir Putin over his invasion of Ukraine or to isolate him? Should Kyiv make concessions to end the war, or would that embolden the Kremlin? Are ramped up sanctions on Russia worth the collateral damage?These are some of the questions testing the international alliance that swiftly rallied around Ukraine in the days after the Russian invasion but that, three months into the war, is straining, officials and diplomats told Reuters.As Western governments grapple with spiralling inflation and energy costs, countries including Italy and Hungary have called for a quick...

Elon Musk may walk away from his $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter Inc if the social media network fails to provide data on spam and fake accounts, the billionaire warned in a letter to the company Monday. Twitter was in a "clear material breach" of its obligations and that Musk reserves all rights to terminate the merger agreement, said the letter from the Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom law firm representing the Tesla and SpaceX CEO . The letter to Twitter, dated Monday, was included in Twitter a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Earlier in March,...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Republicans blocked a bill titled the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act in Congress on Thursday that Democrats view as a response to a white supremacist's killing of 10 Black people this month and a potential gateway to a gun control bill. Two days after another mass killing of 19 young children and two teachers at a Texas school, senators voted 47-47 along party lines, short of the 60 senators required to launch debate, to reject the bill authorizing federal agencies to monitor and report jointly on domestic terrorism within the United States, including incidents related to...

LONDON (Reuters) -In a sign of Russia's urgent need to bolster its war effort in Ukraine, parliament said on Friday it would consider a bill to allow Russians over 40 and foreigners over 30 to sign up for the military. The website of the State Duma, parliament's lower house, said the move would enable the military to utilise the skills of older professionals. "For the use of high-precision weapons, the operation of weapons and military equipment, highly professional specialists are needed. Experience shows that they become such by the age of 40–45," it said. Currently, only Russians aged 18-40 and...

I’ve written about Zac Kriegman before. He’s a former Director of Data Science for Reuters who was fired after he challenged some of the assumptions behind the claims made by Black Lives Matter proponents. Today, Bari Weiss published Kriegman’s first hand account of how he changed his mind about BLM and what happened when he brought those concerns to his co-workers in the form of a 12,000 word argument posted on an internal discussion board. In 2020, I started to witness the spread of a new ideology inside the company. On our internal collaboration platform, the Hub, people would post...

A former director of data science at Thomson Reuters said he was fired for sharing research on the company's internal social media platform that showed police killed more unarmed white people than black people and that the Black Lives Matter movement allegedly caused the deaths of thousands. Zac Kriegman, who worked at Thomson Reuters for six years before being fired last summer, claimed he was let go from his $350,000 job because he stood against the company's reporting conventions on BLM in order to dispel what the 'false narrative' that black people were the largest victim of police violence. In...

Marcelo Pecci, a Paraguayan prosecutor known for his work in fighting organized crime, was killed on the Colombian tourism island of Baru on Tuesday, authorities from both countries said. Pecci and his wife, Paraguayan journalist Claudia Aguilera, were on their honeymoon at a resort near the Caribbean city of Cartagena. They had announced Aguilera's pregnancy on Instagram earlier on Tuesday. Aguilera told Paraguayan media the couple were approached by two men on a private beach connected to their hotel before her husband was shot. He had not received threats, she added.

KYIV/LONDON, May 10 (Reuters) - Ukraine said on Tuesday it would suspend the flow of gas through a transit point which it said delivers almost a third of the fuel piped from Russia to Europe through Ukraine, blaming Moscow for the move and saying it would move the flows elsewhere. Ukraine has remained a major transit route for Russian gas to Europe even after Moscow's invasion. GTSOU, which operates Ukraine's gas system, said it would stop shipments via the Sokhranivka route from Wednesday, declaring "force majeure", a clause invoked when a business is hit by something beyond its control. But...

NEW YORK, May 6 (Reuters) - A federal appeals court on Friday reinstated Florida's new Republican-backed voting restrictions, overruling a judge's decision that several provisions such as limits on ballot drop boxes were racially discriminatory. U.S. Judge Mark Walker in Tallahassee had struck down the bulk of the law in March, finding that lawmakers had designed the legislation to be "intentionally discriminatory" against Black voters. He also ordered the state to seek court approval to make any changes to the provisions in question for the next 10 years. But a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals...

On Tuesday, Reuters reporters saw several hundred men registering with Ethiopian security guards outside the embassy. The guards recorded their names and asked for proof of military service...But many in Ethiopia have voiced solidarity with Russia, which has enjoyed close relations with the Horn of Africa nation since the Soviet era...A man who came out of the embassy and addressed the volunteers in Russian through an interpreter said Russia had enough forces for now, but that they would be contacted when they were needed.

March 23 (Reuters) - Russia plans to switch its gas sales to "unfriendly" countries to roubles, President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday, responding to a freeze on Russia's assets by foreign nations over events in Ukraine that he said had destroyed Moscow's trust. European countries' dependence on Russian gas and other exports has been thrown into the spotlight since Russia sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine. “Russia will continue, of course, to supply natural gas in accordance with volumes and prices ... fixed in previously concluded contracts," Putin said at a televised meeting with top government ministers. "The...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Forty-nine of the 50 Republican U.S. senators said on Monday they will not back an emerging new nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, underscoring their party's opposition to attempts to revive a 2015 accord amid fears talks might collapse. They pledged to do everything in their power to reverse an agreement that does not "completely block" Iran's ability to develop a nuclear weapon, constrain its ballistic missile program and "confront Iran's support for terrorism." Tehran denies it has ever sought atomic bombs. Senator Rand Paul was the only Republican member of the Senate who did not sign...

LONDON (Reuters) - Russia on Thursday shifted its stance over the bombing of a Ukrainian hospital in the city of Mariupol, with a mix of statements that veered between aggressive denials and a call by the Kremlin to establish clear facts.Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskiy said three people including a child had been killed in the bombing on Wednesday, and rejected Russian assertions there had been no patients there."Like always, they lie confidently," said Zelenskiy, who has accused Moscow of waging genocide in the war it launched two weeks ago.In the face of worldwide condemnation there were rare signs of inconsistency...