Free Republic

Alex Mercouris describes the situation in BakhmutApparently there are still a couple of thousand ukies holed up in one little corner of Bakhmut in basements and hide holes of verious sorts. Mercouris claims that the order has gone out to those unfortunates that their "job" is to prevent Bakhmut falling prior to May 10; that is, their job is to prevent Russians from celebrating the capture of the place on or prior to VE day, which is a big annual celebratiion in Russia. Whoever issued that order plainly does not give a rat's ass about the lives of country 404's...

An Indian student who travelled to Iraq to join the Islamic State group has returned home disillusioned after jihadists made him clean toilets and do other menial jobs, according to media reports. Areeb Majeed, 23, left for Iraq with three friends in late May amid fears by authorities that IS militants were attempting to recruit from India's large pool of young Muslim men. Majeed told NIA officers he was sidelined by the jihadists for whom he fetched water and performed other lowly tasks such as cleaning toilets, instead of taking part in the deadly offensive like he wanted, the Press...

Honeybees will die out in Britain within a decade as virulent diseases and parasites spread through the nation's hives, experts have warned. Whole colonies of bees are already being wiped out, with current methods of pest control unable to stop the problem. The British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) said that if the crisis continued, honeybees would disappear completely from Britain by 2018, causing "calamitous" economic and environmental problems. It called on the Government to restart shelved research programmes and to fund new ones to try to save the insects. Tim Lovett, the association's president, said: "The situation has become insupportable and...

MARSHALL, Calif. (AP) - One of California's rarest plants was nearly wiped out of existence when Marin County workers used a backhoe to clear a plugged roadside drain in the species' sole habitat. The Baker's larkspur, a purplish plant that blooms April through May and grows up to 2-feet tall, is found in only one place in the world: near a a drain along the Marshall-Petaluma Road in western Marin County. Last October, heavy rain pushed debris down a hillside into the culvert, backing it up and flooding the road. When county crews came out to clear the roadside drain...

Mary Wiper, the leader of the Sierra Club in New Mexico, died Sunday after being struck by lightning while hiking with friends in Breckenridge, Colo. "This accident— it's just about as random as anything nature can serve up," said Lawson LeGate, the senior Southwest region representative for the Sierra Club and Wiper's boss. Wiper, 28, and two others were struck during a thunderstorm. The other two regained consciousness but were unable to revive Wiper. Wiper took over last May as Sierra Club's associate field representative for the Southwest. She oversaw projects in New Mexico, including the Sierra Club's participation in...