Free Republic

Flights from Catania airport in Sicily were grounded on Sunday after volcanic ash from an eruption of Mount Etna covered the runways. Airport authorities announced that flights would be suspended until Monday 9 a.m. local time (3 a.m. ET) due to the fallout from the eruption on Twitter. They later told CNN that flights are expected to resume at midday Monday (6 a.m. ET).

Moscow planned to celebrated the annexation of huge swathes of Eastern Ukraine Friday but Putin’s party was wrecked by a lightning counter-attack that may have trapped thousands of his men in a key city supposedly now part of Russia. Ukrainian sources claimed that the strategic city of Lyman, which has served as a Russian military hub in Donetsk, has been encircled and supply lines cut. “Lyman! The operation to encircle the Russian group is at the stage of completion,” said Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksiy Goncharenko on Friday. The claim could not be independently verified but, if confirmed, it would be one...

ROME—Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Pope Francis has floated the idea that he wants to take a trip to Kyiv to try to broker a ceasefire. But now he says he would prefer to go to Moscow to try to talk some sense into Vladimir Putin, who he has not outwardly condemned in the now nearly three-month-old war and only did so lightly in a lengthy interview with an Italian newspaper. “I feel that before going to Kyiv, I must go to Moscow,” he told Corriere Della Sera in an interview that ran Tuesday. But the meeting...

Switzerland has just legalized a new way to die by assisted suicide. The country’s medical review board has just given authorization for use of the Sarco Suicide Pod, which is a 3-D-printed portable coffin-like capsule with windows that can be transported to a tranquil place for a person’s final moments of life. Conventional assisted-suicide methods have generally involved a chemical substance. Inventor Philip Nitschke of Exit International told the website SwissInfo.ch that his “death pod” offers a different approach. “We want to remove any kind of psychiatric review from the process and allow the individual to control the method themselves,”...

(CNN)Most of the 250 permanent residents of a volcanic Italian island have been told to evacuate after levels of carbon dioxide in the air spiked dangerously, causing respiratory problems to people and their pets. Carbon dioxide levels around the volcanic island of Vulcano in the Aeolian archipelago off the north coast of Sicily have risen from 80 tons to 480 tons, effectively reducing the amount of oxygen in the air, according to the Italian National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV).... ...In a message on the Lipari Comune's Facebook page, Giorgianni explained Sunday that the evacuation is not because of...

SOMMA VESUVIANA, ITALY–When 19-year-old Finnegan Elder and 18-year-old Gabe Natale Hjorth were first met by two undercover police officers with Italy’s military Carabiniere police force on a dark street near the Vatican in Rome, they thought they were about to get jumped. According to a 14-page document from the investigating judge, which was reviewed by The Daily Beast, the two Americans had earlier approached Sergio Brugiatelli, a layabout who can always be found on Piazza Mastei in Rome's Trastevere district, for cocaine. Brugiatelli pointed them to a pusher. The Americans allegedly thought they were buying cocaine, but when their €100...

On a blistering July morning in Rome, a man in a white hazmat suit is collecting samples from a pile of festering and oddly shimmering liquid that has seeped from a dumpster into the cobblestone lanes near the Roman Colosseum. Around the corner, traffic is backed up on a major street as a massively overfed seagull and a diseased-looking raven tussle over the carcass of a bloated rat. Garbage bags ripped open by rodents spill the contents—rotting food and curdled milk—onto picturesque squares. Citizens have taken matters into their own hands, liberally scattering rat poisoning in the overflowing dumpsters, but...