Free Republic

The Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin has said Russia’s defence ministry concocted false pretences to trick Vladimir Putin into invading Ukraine and said Moscow could have avoided the war entirely. In a half-hour tirade Prigozhin, founder of the notorious Wagner mercenary group, claimed Russia had faced no immediate threat from Ukraine when Putin began his full-scale invasion last year and accused the army’s top brass of deceiving the Russian president for their own personal gain. The extraordinary rant, posted on social media on Friday, was the former caterer’s latest salvo in a long-running spat with defence minister Sergei Shoigu, who Prigozhin...

Another apocalyptic conspiracy theory is going around on TikTok — but there’s a simple answer to it. The online panic started when a video of Friedrich Merz, a German politician, posted to Twitter saying, “Dear Colleagues…September 24, 2022, will be remembered by all of us as a day which we will say, ‘I remember exactly where I was.’ “ The remark sparked several conspiracy theories of things going wrong that day, including that a big solar flare would hit the earth and create tropical cyclones resulting in mass destruction, according to Middle East Mashable.