Free Republic

MUNICH (Reuters) - President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Saturday Ukraine would never accept any peace deals reached behind its back or without Kyiv's involvement - an implicit message to U.S. President Donald Trump as he strives to end the war with Russia.In a speech to the Munich Security Conference, Zelenskiy also called on Europe to create its own armed forces, urging the continent's leaders to decide their own future and saying Ukraine's armed forces alone were not enough for their security."Ukraine will never accept deals made behind our backs without our involvement. And the same rule should apply to all...

MUNICH (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Friday that his country wants “security guarantees” before any talks with Russia, as the Trump administration presses both countries to find a quick endgame to the three-year war. Shortly before sitting down with Vice President JD Vance for highly anticipated talks at the Munich Security Conference, Zelenskyy said he will only agree to meet in-person with Russian leader Vladimir Putin after a common plan is negotiated with U.S. President Donald Trump. The roughly 40-minute meeting between Vance and Zelenskyy produced no major announcements detailing the way out of the deadliest war in...

(The Center Square) - Los Angeles City council voted to pass a $30 minimum wage for hotel and airport workers, along with an additional healthcare benefit starting at $8.35 per hour for employees of businesses that do not provide health insurance. Businesses say the large spike in wages will lead to closures, scaling back employees, and hotels backing out of agreements put in place for the 2028 Olympics — and could threaten the city budget.... Hotels say the new wage increase is unaffordable, especially with income for many hotels flat as other costs rise, and could leave some with no...

* The growth in EV demand is outpacing the infrastructure needed to charge them, with experts predicting the need for more than a million new public EV charging stations in the U.S. by 2030 to accommodate the demand. * Both cobalt and silicon, which are crucial for renewable energy sources like EV batteries, are in oversupply, causing bearish pressure on their prices; increased output from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and China is a key reason behind this. * The production of grain-oriented electrical steel (GOES), necessary for the power sector and increasingly hard to source, is facing difficulties...

The Biden administration on Wednesday announced a new proposed rule that will prevent new or newly renovated federal buildings from being powered by fossil fuels by 2030. The new standards will force the government to use green energy technologies to power its buildings in hopes of cutting carbon emissions and meeting international climate goals, according to an Energy Department (DOE) memo. Starting in 2025, government buildings, which are responsible for roughly 25% of all federal carbon emissions, must also reduce their on-site emissions relating to energy use by 90% compared to 2003 levels. “Ridding pollution from our buildings and adopting...

Today my long-awaited energy storage paper was officially published on the website of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Here is a link. The paper is 22 pages long in the form in which they have published it plus another few pages for an Executive Summary and table of contents. They have given it the title “The Energy Storage Conundrum.” Most of the points made in the paper have been made previously on this blog in one form or another. However, there is a good amount of additional detail in the paper that has never appeared here. I’ll provide one example...

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine, ordered the Ukrainian military to re-establish control over coastal regions in southern Ukraine. Ukraine is amassing a million-strong fighting force in order to achieve this goal.Source: Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s Minister of Defence, in an interview for The Times [of London]Details: "Ukraine is massing a million-strong fighting force equipped with western weapons to recover its southern territory from Russia," The Times wrote.Reznikov said that President Zelenskyy had ordered Ukraine’s military to retake occupied coastal areas which are vital to the country’s economy.Quote from Reznikov: "We understand that, politically, it’s very necessary for our country. The president...

A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time. According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second. However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory. The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons - energetic packets of light - travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of...

AN EXTRAORDINARY "hyperspace" engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government. The hypothetical device, which has been outlined in principle but is based on a controversial theory about the fabric of the universe, could potentially allow a spacecraft to travel to Mars in three hours and journey to a star 11 light years away in just 80 days, according to a report in today's New Scientist magazine. The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late...

The captain of the USS Enterprise thinks people should stay on Earth instead of going into space. Patrick Stewart, who plays Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the TV series Star Trek, says he thinks interplanetary travel for humans is a bad idea. "I'm a bit of a wet blanket when it comes to the whole business of space travel," Stewart told the BBC. "I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilisations out onto other planets - even though they may be utterly uninhabited," he said. Stewart said he...