Free Republic

Russia has launched its biggest drone attack on Kyiv since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began last year, the city's mayor has said. Residents were woken by explosions before dawn on Saturday, and for more than six hours, the booms of Kyiv's air defences echoed through the city. There was wave after wave of attacks from the north and east. Officials said that more than 75 Iranian-made Shahed drones were fired at the capital, and 74 were shot down. With Russia's dwindling missile stocks, Shahed drones are seen as a cheap alternative. They are slower than ballistic missiles and have...

MOSCOW, Feb. 1 (Xinhua) -- More than 146.4 million people permanently resided in Russia as of Jan. 1, down 555,332 from the past year, data published by the country's Federal Statistics Service showed on Wednesday. More than 40 million people lived in the Central Federal District and over 13 million of them lived in Moscow, the capital and largest city of Russia. More than 13.6 million people lived in the Northwestern Federal District and almost 5.6 million of them lived in the country's second largest city of St. Petersburg. Some 109.6 million people permanently resided in urban areas, with 16...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – No more than one-quarter of Americans trusts the news media, but the greatest confidence in the struggling newspaper industry ironically comes from young people, a poll said Friday. The Gallup poll found that 25 percent of Americans felt a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in newspapers and 22 percent in television news, in line with a steady slide over the past two decades. The media were among the national institutions in which Americans placed the least confidence, although Congress, big business and health care coverage providers fared worse. However, 49 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds said...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - NASA (news - web sites)'s two robotic rovers on Mars have begun scaling back their working hours as the approach of autumn on the Red Planet and dust on their solar panels slowly chokes off their power supplies, a NASA official said on Friday. The rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which landed on the Red Planet three weeks apart in January, are engaged in intensive searches for signs of water on opposite sides of Mars. Evidence of rocks or soil that formed in water would help validate scientists' theories that for the first half of its 4.6-billion-year...