Free Republic

Vladimir Putin had been due to meet with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi later this month. However, in a sign of growing Russian isolation on the world stage, an Indian government source said the meeting has now been abruptly cancelled. The move to cancel the annual face-to-face meeting was taken after veiled threats by Vladimir Putin to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war, according to Bloomberg News. Indian and Russian leaders have held face-to-face meetings every year for the past 21 years - except for 2020 due to Covid. An Indian official told Bloomberg that a meeting with President...

...Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said investigators had seized 63.7 Bitcoins, now valued at about $2.3 million, paid by Colonial (COLPI.UL) after last month's hack of its systems that led to massive shortages at U.S. East Coast gas stations....An affidavit filed on Monday said the FBI was in possession of a private key to unlock the hackers' Bitcoin wallet. It was unclear how the FBI gained access to this key...."Today, we've turned the tables on DarkSide," said Monaco, referring to a ransomware group widely believed to have been behind the crippling fuel pipeline attack.

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from Facebook that requested the court intervene in a $15 billion class-action lawsuit alleging the firm illegally tracked the online activities of its users when they are not on the platform, thereby violating the federal Wiretap Act law. “Facebook’s user profiles would allegedly reveal an individual’s likes, dislikes, interests, and habits over a significant amount of time, without affording users a meaningful opportunity to control or prevent the unauthorized exploration of their private lives,” the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a ruling (pdf) last year, saying that Facebook users...

There have been a number of major protesting fails caught on video over the past few days, like these looters robbing other looters in Philadelphia: Looters robbing Looters. Kensington. #riots2020 #philly @CBSNews @CBSPhilly pic.twitter.com/BoyYfiMOFI — manuelsmith And the same thing happened in Walnut Creek, CA:

A funny thing happened on the way to Vladimir Putin running strategic laps around the West. Russia's economy imploded. The latest news is that Russia's central bank raised interest rates from 10.5 to 17 percent at an emergency 1 a.m. meeting in an attempt to stop the ruble, which is down 50 percent on the year against the dollar, from falling any further. It's a desperate move to save Russia's currency that comes at the cost of sacrificing Russia's economy. So even if it "works," things are about to get a lot worse. It's a classic kind of emerging markets...

Cyprus and Russia - what's the difference (aside from the fact that the former was a money laundering offshore center of the latter until last year of course)? If you said one is a lackey to statist, selfish banker interests, and after having its economy thoroughly destroyed by the great doomed European sociopolitical (and pathological) experiment, came crawling back to its Eurozone masters, while the other couldn't care one bit about Pax Petrodollariana and the global central bank cabal, you are right. In which case it will also be clear why a few hours ago that joke of a...

Check out this very ugly chart: Shares of NYT (NYT) dropped 29 cents today to close at $3.77. The Sunday paper goes for $4 at the newsstand. Maybe they could save costs by printing the paper on their stock certificates.

SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) - Savannah police say a homeless man was electrocuted after apparently trying to steal copper from wires on a utility pole. The Savannah-Chatham Metro Police say the man, whose identity was withheld until notification of relatives, fell from the pole near the Amtrak station Sunday night after he tried to cut live wires at the top. More than 100 cases of copper theft were reported to Savannah police last year, and it continues to be a problem.

Saturday February 12, 01:26 PM 'You picked the wrong man' A young punk who tried to mug an 88-year-old picked the wrong man -- his intended victim turned out to be a former boxing champion who knocked the attacker out cold. "I was visiting a friend's grave when a young, long-haired man came up to me and demanded I hand over my money," said granddad Gerhard Brinkmann of Halberstadt, Germany, who was the country's top lightweight boxer in 1936. "I told him to come closer if he wanted it and, as he did, I landed a full-force right hook on...

<p>March 5, 2004 -- A gun-wielding robber got his comeuppance from one of his victims last night - a federal agent who gunned him down during a robbery attempt on the Lower East Side, cops said. The unidentified agent was confronted by the robber on the first floor of an Avenue D building around 11:30 p.m.</p>