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According to a Norwegian International Affairs researcher, the images people in Russia are being shown by the official media are far from the brutal reality of the Ukraine war. Russian president Vladimir Putin is reportedly painting a completely different picture of his ongoing invasion of neighbouring Ukraine. For people only consuming Russian media, it comes across as there being an ongoing "special military operation" in Ukraine, which has the aim of protecting the people of East Ukraine against the so-called nationalistic government in Kyiv. Russian state television aired a short statement by Putin last week, where he described Ukrainian president...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Joe Biden's meeting with New York Mayor Eric Adams on Thursday to discuss combating escalating gun crime signals Democrats want to send a message that they will not cede the issue of public safety to Republicans this election year. Republicans contend that a pandemic-era spike in homicides and gun crimes in urban areas across the nation is tied to Democratic backing for the “defund the police” movement that arose out of the racial justice protests of 2020. With U.S. voters ranking crime among their top concerns and support for Biden eroding in the suburbs, a Biden...

Joe Rogan said something interesting in his Instagram post the other day when he was responding to the Spotify controversy about his podcasts. He talked about his view on the media attacking him for “misinformation.”“The problem I have with the term misinformation – especially today – is that many of the things that we thought of as misinformation just a short while ago are now accepted as fact, like for instance, if you said eight months ago, you can still catch COVID, and you can still spread COVID, you’d be removed from social media. They would ban you from certain...

Reuters rushed to spin Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla’s recent comments on his company’s vaccine in a so-called “Fact Check” and failed to disclose that a senior executive in the Reuters apparatus happens to sit on Pfizer’s board of directors. Reuters attempted to fact-check a video circulating of Bourla on Yahoo! Finance on the efficacy of his vaccine against the Omicron COVID-19 variant. Bourla made a revealing statement that “two doses of the vaccine offer very limited protection, if any. The three doses with the booster — they offer reasonable protection against hospitalizations and deaths,” but “less protection against infection.” Reuters...

Zac Kriegman had the ideal résumé for the professional-managerial class: a bachelors in economics from Michigan and a J.D. from Harvard and years of experience with high-tech startups, a white-shoe law firm, and an econometrics research consultancy. He then spent six years at Thomson Reuters Corporation, the international media conglomerate, spearheading the company’s efforts on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced software engineering. By the beginning of 2020, Kriegman had assumed the title of Director of Data Science and was leading a team tasked with implementing deep learning throughout the organization. But within a few months, this would all collapse....

Reuters photographer Leah Millis was covering a rally for then-President Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021 when she received a text from her colleague Tom Brenner at 1:06 p.m.Four chaotic hours later, she captured the exact moment a flash-bang grenade, fired by law enforcement to disperse protesters, illuminated the Capitol steps, throwing tear-gas smoke into sharp relief and casting a shadow of the American flag onto the iconic dome. The image reverberated across the United States and abroad in 2021. Media outlets and Congress have used it to emphasize the gravity of the day and to illustrate a symbol of...

Contrary to online claims, the Omicron variant of COVID-19 does not have a 100% survival rate, as some social media users suggest. The variant identified by the World Health Organization as a variant of concern on November 26, 2021, has been a contributing factor in worldwide deaths. A misleading statement published to Facebook, which reads: “The survival rate for Omicron currently is 100%! You’re statistically more likely to die from literally anything else” is viewable here Similar posts are visible here and here . According to the guidance (here ) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), public...

The European Union’s executive Commission is considering whether to include nuclear and natural gas in its “sustainable finance taxonomy”, a rulebook that will restrict which activities can be labelled as climate-friendly investments. “We are going to have most likely a discussion tomorrow in college, which then will lead… to approval next year,” EU environment commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius told a news conference on Monday, referring to the Commission’s weekly “college” meeting.

U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told his Russian counterpart Monday that Washington is ready to engage in diplomacy through multiple channels, including bilateral engagement, the White House said in a statement. Sullivan told Yuriy Ushakov, foreign policy adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, that "any dialogue must be based on reciprocity and address our concerns about Russia's actions," the White House said.

WASHINGTON, Dec 19 (Reuters) - U.S. health officials urged Americans on Sunday to get booster shots, wear masks and be careful if they travel over the winter holidays, with the Omicron variant raging across the world and likely to take over as the dominant strain in the United States. The government is gearing up for the next phase of battle in a two-year fight against a virus that has killed 800,000 and disrupted every aspect of daily life. Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told CBS' "Face the Nation" that the number of Omicron cases will...

Brand CEO Brandstaetter to join management board - sources Supervisory board to meet on Thursday HAMBURG, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess will likely stay on to lead Europe's largest carmaker as part of a solution that will see him cede some responsibilities following a clash with labour leaders, two people familiar with the matter said. The solution would potentially end the carmaker's latest leadership tussle, which has caused uncertainty among investors and led the group's preferred shares to fall significantly in recent weeks. After protracted negotiations led by Volkswagen Supervisory Board Chairman Hans Dieter Poetsch, a way...

The chairman and former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Reuters news agency – James C. Smith – is a top investor and board member for pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer. He was elected to the board in 2014, as well as joining Pfizer’s Corporate Governance and Science and Technology Committees. The news raises serious conflict of interest concerns as corporate media outlets such as Reuters continue to promote Pfizer products, defend pharmaceuticals companies from criticism, and move to silence skeptics. Smith is currently the Chairman of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the London-based charity known for providing news and information to billions...

Nine U.S. House Democrats have asked the Justice Department to release American environmental lawyer Steven Donziger, who spent decades battling Chevron Corp over pollution in the Ecuadorian rainforest. The disbarred lawyer was handed a six-month imprisonment sentence in October for criminal contempt arising from a lawsuit brought by the oil company. The Democrats including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib on Monday said in a letter addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland that the lawyer was jailed for "petty contempt of court". "As the United States is a party to the District Court case against Mr. Donziger, we request that you...

Australia on Friday called for governments around the world to agree on "rules of the road" to fight the spread of misinformation and state-backed disinformation online. Foreign Minister Marise Payne said blocs like the Quad group - the United States, India, Japan and Australia - and global bodies like the United Nations were already working to strike a balance between harmful content and free expression online. But time was running out to agree on rules of what was permissable. "We should be starting yesterday," Payne told a panel at the Sydney Dialogue virtual event alongside Facebook Inc's global affairs boss.

NEW YORK (Reuters) -A New York trial judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the New York Times from publishing some materials concerning the conservative activist group Project Veritas, a rare step that the newspaper said violated decades of First Amendment protections for the process. The order by Justice Charles Wood of the Westchester County Supreme Court covers memos written by a Project Veritas lawyer and obtained by the Times. Wood scheduled a hearing for next Tuesday to consider a longer prohibition against publication, and whether the Times should remove references to privileged attorney-client information in a Nov. 11 article about Project...

Ukraine's use of Turkish strike drones in the conflict in the eastern Donbass region is defensive and does not violate any agreements, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Friday. Russia accused Ukraine of destabilising the situation after government forces used a Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drone to strike a position controlled by Russian-backed separatists this week. read more The General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces said it had deployed the drone to force pro-Russian separatists to cease fire and the drone had destroyed an artillery unit belonging to the separatists using a guided bomb. "When the Ukrainian army feels the need to...

Donald Trump has united some of his supporters and detractors in buying shares in his new company and hoping to score a big win. Anthony Nguyen, a 49-year-old software consultant from Austin, Texas, is a Republican who refused to vote for the former U.S. president in last year's election. Last week he joined the millions of online day traders who drove up the value of the company that will house Trump's new social media venture to almost $12 billion. The company's app has yet to be rolled out even on a trial basis, and Nguyen said he invested because he...

A state judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit by Georgia voters and self-described election integrity activists who alleged that officials in Atlanta's Fulton County had counted fraudulent ballots in the November 2020 election. Henry County Superior Court Judge Brian Amero in McDonough just southeast of Atlanta, who oversaw the case, ruled that the petitioners had failed to allege injuries that affected them in a "personal and individual way," leaving them with no standing to bring the lawsuit. The order is the latest defeat for private groups in the United States which have claimed without evidence that widespread voting fraud in...

At a recent Virginia rally, Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin talked up his plans to boost the economy and fight crime, and said nothing at all about false claims that Democratic President Joe Biden's election victory was the result of fraud.But some in the crowd heard the message all the same, moments before the former private equity executive's speech, when Republican state Senator Amanda Chase told Youngkin supporters - offstage and without a microphone - that she was on guard against a repeat of election cheating."I know what the Democrats are trying to do," she said in an interview after...

PRAGUE (Reuters) - Czech voters evicted the communists from parliament on Saturday for the first time since the end of World War Two, voting out a party whose forebears ruled the central European nation from 1948 until the Velvet Revolution of 1989 that ushered in democracy.