Free Republic

Officials in Kyiv and several Western countries rejected claims made without evidence by the Kremlin that Ukraine is planning to use a “dirty bomb” — an explosive weapon designed to scatter radioactive material — on its own territory, characterizing them as an attempt by Russia to create a pretext for escalating the conflict. “We all reject Russia’s transparently false allegations that Ukraine is preparing to use a dirty bomb on its own territory,” foreign ministers from the United States, France and the United Kingdom said in a Sunday joint statement, after Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made the unfounded claim...

At least 85 percent of the global population has experienced weather events made worse by climate change, according to research published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change. Using machine learning to analyze and map more than 100,000 studies of events that could be linked to global warming, researchers paired the analysis with a well-established data set of temperature and precipitation shifts caused by fossil fuel use and other sources of carbon emissions. These combined findings - which focused on events such as crop failures, floods and heat waves - allowed scientists to make a solid link between escalating extremes...